Just finished Cazalet Chronicles - can you recommend anything similar?

[redblonde]

I loved the Cazalet Chronicles and they helped me disappear into another world! Could anyone recommend anything similar? Thanks

Oh, I totally agree with you. This story is awesome!

I'm about to start book 3 in the Cazalet saga and can't imagine life without them so I'm following this thread with great (desperate) interest

Anything by Nancy Mitford 💕

I'd suggest:

Life After Life (and I think there are a couple of others with the same family)
Any Human Heart
My Brilliant Friend (and subsequent books in the series - 4 in total)
Yes to Nancy Mitford suggestion, reading a good biography of the Mitford Family is also fascinating.

The penny vincenzi trilogy spoils of time. The first one is No Angel. I read them years ago and just got them out again

Mary Wesley, perhaps. And agree with Life After Life

Which is the first cazalet novel I should read?

The Light Years is the first one.

I thought I'd started the third one last week but it's actually the fourth!

Loving it 😍

Any Human Heart is a great call.

Middlemarch

@EmmaStone - I love reading biographies about them too. I’m currently reading Deborah Mitford’s autobiography it’s fascinating.

RF Delderfield's The Dreaming Suburb and its sequel The Avenue Goes to War, set between the wars and in the Second World War.

Naguib Mahfouz's Cairo Trilogy: Palace Walk, Palace of Desire, Sugar Street, following a middle-class Egyptian family in British-occupied Egypt at the time of the First World War.

John Galsworthy's The Forsyte Saga, which follows an upper middle-class Victorian family from the 1880s to about 1920. The first novel is The Man of Property.

I loved the Cazalets but the final one, All Change, was a disappointment. It was published much later and is a lot weaker.

Wasn't the Cazalets lovely?

I'm.so jealous of you reading The Cazalets for the first time!

I second Life After Life.

They're fabulous books, I revisit them every few years. So imersive, really gives you a feeling of what people's lives were like then. The characters really stay with you.
It's a bit earlier and not wartime (20s), but I enjoyed The House of Elliot by Jean Marsh or maybe some EM Forester (even earlier).

EM Forster even!

Pillars of the Earth by Ken Follett. Not the same time period but family saga.

Have you read the Poldark series by Winston Graham?
Now, don't yell at me...the books are about a billion times better than the TV series, so much more atmosphere and detail. And they are really just a family saga, like the Cazalets, although obviously set in a different time.