Casting Off

As featured on BBC Radio 4 Open BookThe Second World War has finally ended and so begins a new era of freedom and opportunity for the Cazalet family in Casting Off, the fourth novel in Elizabeth Jane Howard's magnificent Cazalet Chronicles.'She helps us to do the necessary thing – open our eyes and our hearts' – Hilary Mantel, bestselling author of Wolf HallThe Cazalet cousins are now in their twenties, trying to piece together their lives in the aftermath of the Second World War. Louise is faced with her father’s new mistress and her mother’s grief at his betrayal, while suffering a loveless marriage of her own. Clary is struggling to understand why her beloved father chose to stay in France long after it was safe to return to Britain, and both she and Polly are madly in love with much older men.As Polly, Clary and Louise face the truth about the adult world, their fathers – Rupert, Hugh and Edward – must make choices that will decide their own, and the family’s, future.'Howard . . . writes about pain, loss and longing superbly well' – Monica Ali, bestselling author of Love MarriageCasting Off is the heartbreaking and heartwarming fourth instalment of Elizabeth Jane Howard's bestselling series. It is followed by All Change, the fifth and final book in the series.

She is one of those novelists who shows, through her work, what the novel is for . . . She helps us to do the necessary thing – open our eyes and our hearts, Like [Elena] Ferrante, Howard’s fictional sphere is domestic and yet reveals deeper truths about human nature, Howard is a sharp observer of human drama and psychology, and writes about pain, loss and longing superbly well, I don’t know how I’d managed to miss [The Cazalet Chronicles] until now, but they’re absolute heaven, [N]o detail is too small to be included, so charged with significance is the material envelope of that lost world

Elizabeth Jane Howard was the author of fifteen highly acclaimed novels, including the five volumes of The Cazalet Chronicles, as well as After Julius, Falling, Getting It Right, Love All, and Odd Girl Out. The Cazalet Chronicles – The Light Years, Marking Time, Confusion, Casting Off and All Change – have become established as modern classics and have been adapted for a major BBC television series and for BBC Radio 4. She had one child, Nicola, and married three times – lastly to fellow author Sir Kingsley Amis. In 2000 she was awarded a CBE in the Queen’s Birthday Honours List, and in 2002 Macmillan published her autobiography, Slipstream. She died, aged ninety, at home in Suffolk on 2 January 2014.