A courageous and successful continuation of a classic

Courage and chutzpah are needed to follow-up a classic, particularly if the new author is going to continue the classic rather than use it as starting point for something very different. The five novels of The Cazalet Chronicles by Elizabeth Jane Howard published between 1990 and 2013 have been a critical and commercial sense. They tell the story of the upper middle class Cazalet family from the 1930s to the 1950s and are filled with convincing and interesting characters. https://richardswsmith.wordpress.com/2017/06/03/in-praise-of-the-cazalet-chronicles/ I’ve read them all and think of them in some way as a human laboratory. https://richardswsmith.wordpress.com/2016/11/08/a-human-laboratory/ The books might be described—and I mean this positively—as a comfort read. I’ve given them to people who are grieving, and they have been grateful. Louisa Young, who has taken on the challenge of continuing the Chronicles, is not just anybody, she is the niece of Howard, whom she knew and…