Second paragraph of third chapter:

She [Polly] had been kneeling in front of the lavatory having been wrenchingly sick, as she had been every morning for the last week. It was a very old-fashioned lavatory and she had to pull the chain twice. She bathed her face in cold water and washed her hands just as it was reluctantly turning tepid. There wasn’t time for a bath. There was the children’s breakfast to make – the nauseating smell of eggs frying came immediately to her, but the children could make do with boiled ones.

This is the climax of Elizabeth Jane Howard’s superb Cazalet series of books, published in 1983, 18 years after the previous four (which came out in 1990-95) and set ten years after the end of the Second World War which dominated the previous books.

It shows an upper class family in the grip of social and economic change, with the entire basis of their world up-ended by the transformation of post-war Britain. The book starts with the death of the matriarch of the Cazalet family, and ends with a set-piece Christmas celebration in their family home, which they must now leave; in between we see the further development of the well established emotional patterns of behaviour between the Cazalet siblings and their spouses and lovers, and how the next generation starts to make similar mistakes.

At over 500 pages, it seems invidious to single out any plot line, though the same-sex relationship between Rachel Cazalet and her lover Sid is perhaps the most striking (with plenty of competition). I have really enjoyed the five volumes – The Light Years, Marking Time, Confusion, Casting Off and now All Change, and strongly recommend them to anyone looking for a 2600-page reading challenge. You can get All Change here.