The Golden Hours

by Louisa Young

The Golden Hours is the brilliant new instalment in the beloved Cazalet Chronicles, started by Elizabeth Jane Howard and now continued by bestselling author - and Elizabeth Jane Howard's niece - Louisa Young.

It's Christmas, 1962, and the Cazalet family are gathering to celebrate. With the family's beloved Home Place long sold, Polly and Gerald have offered up their rambling stately pile, Fakenham Hall, to cousins, parents, siblings and children.


The old guard - Hugh, Edward, Rupert and Rachel - look on as the England they knew and understood fades from view. Cousins Polly, Louise and Clary, now all on the brink of turning forty, are struggling to balance the demands of midlife with their personal desires - however secret. And then there are the young - a new generation growing up in a society on the cusp of real change.

In Louisa Young's spellbinding new novel, familiar faces will reappear, newcomers will be introduced, and the legacy of the Cazalets will continue on into the swinging sixties . . .

The Golden Hours is the sixth novel in Elizabeth Jane Howard and Louisa Young's Cazalet Chronicles. Read from the beginning of the The Light Years, Marking Time, Casting Off, Confusion, and All Change.

Kindle Edition

Expected publication September 3, 2026

About the author

Louisa Young is a history graduate, and worked as a journalist for British national newspapers and magazines for some years. Her first book was A Great Task of Happiness (1995), the life of Kathleen Bruce, her grandmother, the sculptor and wife of Scott of the Antarctic. She followed that with her Egyptian trilogy of novels: Baby Love (which was listed for the Orange Prize), Desiring Cairo and Tree of Pearls. They were followed by The Book of the Heart, a cultural history of our most symbolic organ. She has also published the Lionboy trilogy of children’s novels, written with her then ten-year-old daughter under the pseudonym Zizou Corder and two further children's novels, Lee Raven Boy Thief and Halo. .
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Her 2011 bestseller My Dear, I Wanted to Tell You, which was shortlisted for the Costa Novel Award 2011 and the Wellcome Book Prize, was a Richard and Judy Book Club choice, and the first ever winner of the Galaxy Audiobook of the Year. It was followed by two sequels, The Heroes' Welcome and Devotion, and a memoir, You Left Early: A True Story of Love and Alcohol, about her relationship with the composer Robert Lockhart.

Her most recent book is a novel, Twelve Months and a Day.

She lives in London.

http://www.louisayoung.co.uk/about.html