The chances are that your summer plans have been a little compromised this year. While you should be dressed in a floaty, strappy bit of ME+EM watching a hot sun cast its last rays upon a twinkling ocean, you may end up sheltering from the drizzle in an English seafront bus-stop. But whichever it is, you’ll still need your holiday reading. And The Cazalet Chronicles is perfect.If you’ve already read Elizabeth Jane Howard’s masterpiece, then there’s no harm in revisiting – I do it all the time. And if it’s new to you – well, then: I envy you. I’ve already banged on about how the family is the perfect setting for any novel. And the Cazalets are the perfect family to read about.

The saga starts in 1937, with war looming, and three generations choosing to live it out together in the family country home. Over the next two decades, we watch them, their friends and their neighbours cope with Hitler, births, deaths, divorces and all the other dramas life throws at us. Your heart will break with the tragedy and sing at the many joyous moments. The children are brilliantly drawn – touching and complicated – with inner lives that are both deep and believable.

The first volume is called The Light Years, and the great news is that there’s another four after that. All are utterly compulsive. Dive in, be transported and it won’t matter where you are – you’ll no longer care.