After Julius

By Elizabeth Jane Howard

From the lauded, bestselling author of The Cazalet Chronicles, After Julius is Elizabeth Jane Howard's funny yet touching story of a family brought together yet falling apart.

'A novel that commands both respect and applause' – Sunday Times

It is twenty years since Julius died, but his last heroic action still affects the lives of the people he left behind.

Emma, his youngest daughter, twenty-seven years old and afraid of men. Cressida, her sister, a war widow, blindly searching for love in her affairs with married men. Esme, Julius's widow, still attractive at fifty-eight, but aimlessly lost in the routine of her perfect home. Felix, Esme's old lover, who left her when Julius died and who is still plagued by guilt for his action. And then there is Dan – an outsider.

Throughout a disastrous – and revelatory – weekend in Sussex, the influence of the dead Julius slowly emerges . . .

'Her talent seemed so effervescent, so unstoppable, that there was no predicting where it might take her' - Hilary Mantel, author of Wolf Hall

• Language: English
• Publisher: Pan Macmillan
• Release date: Sep 23, 2011
• ISBN: 9781447211525

Elizabeth Jane Howard

Elizabeth Jane Howard was the author of fifteen highly acclaimed novels. The Cazalet Chronicles – The Light Years, Marking Time, Confusion, Casting Off and All Change – have become established as modern classics and have been adapted for a major BBC television series and for BBC Radio 4. In 2002 Macmillan published Elizabeth Jane Howard's autobiography, Slipstream. In that same year she was awarded a CBE in the Queen's Birthday Honours List. She died, aged 90, at home in Suffolk on 2 January 2014.

Reviews for After Julius

[starbox_2 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

A family gather for a weekend together; there's 58 year old widow Esme, her two daughters - pianist Cressy, who flits between unhappy affairs, and publisher Emma, who seems to fear men. Joining them are a young working-class poet Emma has just befriended... and doctor Felix King, once Esme's younger lover, but she's not seen him for twenty years.Over the whole situation looms Esme's late husband Julius... a noble character who died in the war, yet whose influence still exerts a pull two decades on...EJ Howard's earliest published work (1965); it's an OK read but not up to the superb standard of her later Cazalet Chronicles

[goldengrove_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

I enjoyed this book a great deal. All of Howard's books (that I've read) are very much of their time - she has a gift for portraying the slightly grubby feel of post-war England - bed sits and inconveniences - in contrast to the pre-war comfort of more established/monied homes. In this she sometimes reminds of aspects of Barbara Pym and Mary Renault (Purposes of Love) The action of the story takes place over a weekend, mostly spent in the country, and concerns a widow, her two daughters, an old lover and a poet who, in their world at least, is slightly odd. The real meat of the story, however, is in the heads of the protagonists, their pasts and their feelings. As always, Howard creates real and interesting characters, and as always there is the strong impression that she is drawing heavily on her own life. Although I enjoyed the book very much, the impressions it leaves of Howard's views on the relations between men and women are disturbing. The two sisters drift along, letting life 'happen' to them, and although the reasons for this are explored they don't seem altogether satisfactory. This is partly to do with changed social mores, but I think also to do with Howard's own life experience. Nevertheless, it is a beautifully written and lingering novel.