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
Elizabeth Jane Howard Born: March 26, 1923, London Died: January 2, 2014. The author of twelve highly acclaimed novels and an absorbing and moving memoir, Slipstream, published in 2002. Her Cazalet Chronicles - Casting Off, The Light Years , Making Time and Confusion - have become established as modern classics and were televised by the BBC. In 2000, she was awarded a CBE in the Queen's Birthday Honours List.
Elizabeth Jane Howard died in January 2014.
Howard’s publisher, Maria Rejt, said: "Elizabeth Jane Howard leaves a body of work - non-fiction and 15 novels including the Cazalet quintet - that is remarkable in its profound humanity. “Her novels illuminate and celebrate what it means to be alive - regardless of age, gender or circumstance - and they moved and inspired countless readers, as her vivacity and wisdom inspired her friends in her own eventful and extremely generous life.
“She was unfairly overlooked by the literary establishment, perhaps because her novels are so eminently readable but that was also part of her extraordinary gift as a writer: her life's lessons were given lightly and generously through her fiction but the struggle was always kept from view."
Pan Macmillan is to publish the paperback of All Change in April, to coincide with a Radio 4 dramatisation of the book.
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