The Golden Hours is the brilliant new instalment in the beloved Cazalet Chronicles, started by Elizabeth Jane Howard and now continued by bestselling author – and Elizabeth Jane Howard’s niece – Louisa Young.

It’s Christmas, 1962, and the Cazalet family are gathering to celebrate. With the family’s beloved Home Place long sold, Polly and Gerald have offered up their rambling stately pile, Fakenham Hall, to cousins, parents, siblings and children.

The old guard – Hugh, Edward, Rupert and Rachel – look on as the England they knew and understood fades from view. Cousins Polly, Louise and Clary, now all on the brink of turning forty, are struggling to balance the demands of midlife with their personal desires – however secret. And then there are the young – a new generation growing up in a society on the cusp of real change.

In Louisa Young’s spellbinding new novel, familiar faces will reappear, newcomers will be introduced, and the legacy of the Cazalets will continue on into the swinging sixties . . .

The Golden Hours is the sixth novel in Elizabeth Jane Howard and Louisa Young’s Cazalet Chronicles. Read from the beginning of the series: The Light Years, Marking Time, Confusion, Casting Off, and All Change.

I’m overjoyed to have this new volume in the Cazalet Chronicles. The Golden Hours is a wonderful read -- Nina Stibbe, bestselling author of Love, Nina
Magnificent - a sweeping, arresting continuation of a dearly beloved series, and a majestic tribute to Elizabeth Jane Howard -- Stacey Halls, bestselling author of The Familiars
A formidable task to undertake, Louisa Young has triumphed. The Golden Hours is so beautifully written and emotionally acute, it had me enraptured. The Cazalets live again, summoned into being by the surest and cleverest of authors -- Elizabeth Buchan, author of Bonjour, Sophie
The Golden Hours is quite simply marvellous. By some magic, Louisa Young has acquired Elizabeth Jane Howard's touch. It seemed impossible that I would love these Cazalets as much as I love the originals, but I honestly do -- Christobel Kent, author of The Loving Husband
Louisa Young is the great chronicler of romantic love and the pain of its loss -- Linda Grant, author of When I Lived in Modern Times, on Twelve Months and a Day
Young possesses in abundance emotional conviction, pace and imaginative energy * The Guardian *
The Cazalets have earned an honoured place among the great saga families * Sunday Telegraph *
Maybe my favourite books ever -- Marian Keyes, bestselling author of My Favourite Mistake, on The Cazalet Chronicles

Louisa Young is a writer and songwriter, a former journalist, a Londoner, and ‘a masterly storyteller’, according to The Washington Post. Her twelve novels include the award-winning My Dear I Wanted to Tell You trilogy, which Elizabeth Jane Howard called ‘a triumph’. She has also written memoir – You Left Early, a True Story of Love and Alcohol; cultural history – The Book of the Heart; and biography – A Great Task of Happiness: The Life of Kathleen Scott (who was Captain Scott’s widow, Louisa’s grandmother and Jane’s mother-in-law).

Louisa is half of the children’s author Zizou Corder, as whom, with her daughter, the actor Isabel Adomakoh Young, she wrote the Lionboy novels for children. And she has also made an album of her own songs, You Left Early, as Birds of Britain, with Alex Mackenzie.

Louisa’s work is published in thirty-two languages, and she is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.