All Change, by Elizabeth Jane Howard, review Elizabeth Jane Howard is 90 years old. Her new novel, All Change, the fifth volume of the Cazalet Chronicles, opens with the death of Kitty Barlow (the Duchy), who is almost 90 in 1956. The Cazalet family matriarch dies peacefully in the family house, Home Place in Sussex. Her daughter Rachel, aged 56, places a white rose between the Duchy's hands, opens the sash window on to the walled garden below, blows her nose, and says "Goodbye, my darling," then leaves the room to "set about the day." A similar tone of matter-of-fact gentility pervades the whole novel. Most of the chapters are named after one, sometimes two and occasionally three, family members. In spare prose, Howard describes one significant event or conversation after another, moving effortlessly between the characters, accumulating a web of human relations between parents, step-parents, grandparents, siblings, cousins, uncles, aunts, within and between the overlapping generations. All relationships, ranging from passionate first love to jaded married love, with myriad variations in between, are calmly treated, as though viewed from a great height. This conversation between a seven-year-old boy and his 15-year-old sister perfectly captures their respective preoccupations at different stages in life: Georgie, competitive, longing to impress; Juliet, a melodramatic adolescent, starting to experiment with strong words and feelings. Another child, Laura, aged six, asks: "When you're dead, can you fly?" and receives the weak parental response, "I don't know darling - I expect so." In one line, Howard sums up the predicament of all parents explaining death to their children for the first time. Houses are powerfully present, too. Home Place, which the Duchy's four children fear losing in the wake of her death, is mainly defined by holidays and Christmases: "It was lovely knowing exactly how everything was going to turn out when there were reassuring things like a Christmas-time feast." The value, but also the fragility, of the fabric of family life, torn by death or other sudden change, is Howard's underlying theme. Almost all the adult characters are searching for their dream home. The Duchy's sons attempt to replicate Home Place, while keeping hold of the original, however costly and burdensome. Their various wives are searching too - either for a home they never had or one that has been lost. More bohemian characters content themselves with cheap flats and transient squalor, like the protagonists of Muriel Spark's novels. Woven into the texture of this family saga is the struggle of the female writer. Clary, the Duchy's granddaughter, born in 1925, the same generation as Howard herself, is a talented novelist, struggling to bring up children and help support her husband, an impecunious artist. Before the children, she wrote two novels that were well received, but since then she has sobbed into the kitchen sink and taken on proofreading to pay the rent. There are fleeting references to Charlotte Brontë and Jane Austen: both childless. Howard allows Clary to write a successful play, despite her domestic distractions. She does not labour the point, but makes clear that women's opportunities to pursue literary careers are one of the welcome post-war changes. Rachel, needing to be needed, defining herself through her usefulness to her mother, lover, siblings, nieces and nephews, provides a counterpoint to these changes in women's lives. For too long Howard was written about as Kingsley Amis's wife and Martin Amis's stepmother. Much as might be said for both roles, they should never have defined her literary presence. Since her first novel, The Beautiful Visit, was published in 1950, winning the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize, she has continued to publish impressive fiction to this day. All Change, by Elizabeth Jane Howard, 400pp, (Mantle, RRP £18.99), is available to order from Telegraph Books for £16.99 (PLUS £1.35 p&p).