The light years

But we now have to move on to another book because I would have liked to have just kept feeling like that and kept talking about that.

But we do have to move on to your second book, Shelfie Book, which is The Light Years by Elizabeth Jane Howard.

First published in 1990 and set in 1937, The Light Years is a modern classic of 20th century English life and is the first novel in Elizabeth Jane Howard's extraordinary best-selling family saga, The Cazalet Chronicles.

It follows the wealthy but emotionally complicated Cazalet family during the late 1930s as they gather at their Sussex home and navigate marriages, affairs, childhood, marriage, anxieties and the looming threat of war.

Told from multiple, notably female-heavy perspectives, it quietly reveals the tensions beneath upper-middle-class English family life just before World War II changes everything.

Now you've said that the Cazalettes live in your heart.

What is it about The Light Years and the family particularly at its centre that creates such a lasting attachment for you as a reader?

Well, this is one of those books, well, maybe it's all of these books, but it's very hard for me, I think particularly with women writers, not to really experience the books as being written by individual women.