Featured on The Book Show on Sky Arts on 30 October 2008.
This is Elizabeth Jane Howard’s first novel for 9 years and it is like welcoming an old friend. This is the story of a group of people brought together in a small West Country town to establish an arts festival. The author has such a keen eye for detail in description of characters and places that you never want to leave them at the end of the last page. A touching and beautiful novel.
From the bestselling author of the Cazalet Chronicles, Elizabeth Jane Howard, Love All is a heartfelt story of love and adulthood in the 1960s.
'Graceful, moving' - Daily Express
The late 1960s. For Persephone Plover, the daughter of distant and neglectful parents, the innocent, isolated days of childhood are long past. Now she must deal with the emotions of an adult world.
Meanwhile in Melton, in the West Country, Jack Curtis - a self-made millionaire - has employed Persephone's aunt. A garden designer in her sixties, she is to deal with the terraces and glasshouses of the once beautiful local manor house - one that he has acquired at vast expense. He also has plans to start an arts festival, as a means to avoid the loneliness of divorce.
Also in Melton are the Musgrove siblings, Thomas and Mary, whose parents originally owned and lived in Melton House. They are still trying to cope with emotional consequences of the tragic death of Thomas's wife, Celia. As is Francis, Celia's brother, who has come to live with them and thereby, perhaps, to find his way through life.
As Jack's festival comes together, so shall these disparate souls - their relationships intertwining, and their loves transformed.
'Her talent seemed so effervescent, so unstoppable, that there was no predicting where it might take her' - Hilary Mantel, author of Wolf Hall
