Los años ligeros

The one of 1937 and the one of 1938. Two unforgettable summers, safe under the golden light of Sussex, where the days are consumed in a succession of children's games and picnics on the beach. Three generations of the wealthy Cazalet family reunited on their home farm. The chores of two grandparents, four children, nine grandchildren, innumerable in-laws, servants, and pets that range from the everyday to the most momentous: the driver drives too slowly, the children rescue their cat from the top of a tree, the Adults speak of the threat of a new war, and the dreams and passions that lurk beneath their light talk barely overshadow the indolent routine of the last happy years that England will long know. When Elizabeth Jane Howard published the first Cazalet Chronicles novel in 1990, she laid the touchstone for what would become an immediate contemporary classic and the most important river-novel written in Britain since A Dance for Music. from Anthony Powell's time. In The Light Years, the author exquisitely outlines the intimate geography of a family and a way of life that, inevitably, already belonged to yesterday's world.