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Biography
Louisa Young is a writer and songwriter, a former journalist, a Londoner, and ‘a masterly storyteller’, according to The Washington Post. Her twelve novels include the award-winning My Dear, I Wanted to Tell You trilogy, which Elizabeth Jane Howard called ‘a triumph’. She has also written memoir – You Left Early: A True Story of Love and Alcohol; cultural history – The Book of the Heart; and biography – A Great Task of Happiness: The Life of Kathleen Scott.
Louisa is half of the children’s author Zizou Corder, as whom, with her daughter, the actor Isabel Adomakoh Young, she wrote the Lionboy novels for children. And she has also made an album of her own songs, You Left Early, as Birds of Britain, with Alex Mackenzie.
Louisa’s work is published in thirty-two languages, and she is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. Her next novel, The Golden Hours, a continuation of the best-selling Cazalet series by Elizabeth Jane Howard, publishes September 2026 with Mantle.
Praise for THE GOLDEN HOURS
‘A formidable task to undertake, Louisa Young has triumphed. The Golden Hours is so beautifully written and emotionally acute, it had me enraptured. The Cazalets live again, summonsed into being by the surest and cleverest of authors.’ Elizabeth Buchan
‘Magnificent – a sweeping, arresting continuation of a dearly beloved series, and a majestic tribute to Elizabeth Jane Howard.’ Stacey Halls
‘I’m overjoyed to have this new volume in the Cazalet Chronicles. The Golden Hours is a wonderful read.’ Nina Stibbe
‘The Golden Hours is quite simply marvellous. By some magic, Louisa Young has acquired Elizabeth Jane Howard’s touch. It seemed impossible that I would love these Cazalets as much as I love the originals, but I honestly do.’ Christobel Kent, author of The Loving Husband
The Golden Hours (Mantle (UK) / Modern Library (US), 2026)
The Golden Hours is the brilliant new instalment in the beloved Cazalet Chronicles, started by Elizabeth Jane Howard and now continued by bestselling author – and Elizabeth Jane Howard’s niece – Louisa Young.
It’s Christmas, 1962, and the Cazalet family are gathering to celebrate. With the family’s beloved Home Place long sold, Polly and Gerald have offered up their rambling stately pile, Fakenham Hall, to cousins, parents, siblings and children.
The old guard – Hugh, Edward, Rupert and Rachel – look on as the England they knew and understood fades from view. Cousins Polly, Louise and Clary, now all on the brink of turning forty, are struggling to balance the demands of midlife with their personal desires – however secret. And then there are the young – a new generation growing up in a society on the cusp of real change.
In Louisa Young’s spellbinding novel, familiar faces will reappear, newcomers will be introduced, and the legacy of the Cazalets will continue on into the Swinging Sixties . . .
The Golden Hours is the sixth novel in Elizabeth Jane Howard and Louisa Young’s Cazalet Chronicles. Join the story here, or read from the beginning of the series: The Light Years, Marking Time, Confusion, Casting Off, and All Change.
Publications
Selected Publications
Rasmus and Jay, Róisín and Nico – two beautiful, ordinary love stories, cut short by death. Jay and Nico don’t even believe in ghosts, yet they seem to be… still here. Still in love with Rasmus and Roísín. And maddeningly powerless.
Both are incapable of leaving the living alone: Jay plays matchmaker, convinced that Rasmus and Róisín can heal each other; Nico, plagued by jealousy, doesn’t agree.
Rasmus and Róisín are just trying to navigate their newly widowed lives.
But all four of them are thinking the same thing: what is love, after death? What is it for? And what are we to do with it?
Moving and thought-provoking, playful and bittersweet, this is a Truly, Madly, Deeply for our times, showcasing one of Britain’s finest contemporary writers at her very best.
From the bestselling author of My Dear, I Wanted to Tell You and The Heroes’ Welcome, Louisa Young’s Devotion is a novel of family, love, race and politics set during the electric change of the 1930s.
Tom loves Nenna. Nenna loves her father. Her father loves Mussolini.
Ideals and convictions are not always so clear in the murky years between the end of the First World War and the beginning of the Second. For Tom and Kitty Locke, children of the damaged WW1 generation, visiting their cousin Nenna in Rome is a pure joy. For their adoptive parents Nadine and Riley, though, the ground is still shifting underfoot.
Nobody knew in 1919 that the children they were bearing would be just ripe for the next war in 1939; nobody knew, in 1935, the implications of an Italian Jewish family supporting Mussolini.
Meanwhile Peter Locke and Mabel Zachary have found each other again together in London, itself a city reborn but riddled with its own intolerances. As the heat rises across Europe, voices grow louder and everyone must brace once more to decide what should bring them together, and what must drive them apart.
The Heroes’ Welcome is the incandescent sequel to the bestselling R&J pick My Dear, I Wanted to Tell You. Its evocation of a time deeply wounded by the pain of WW1 will capture and beguile readers fresh to Louisa Young’s wonderful writing, and those previously enthralled by the stories of Nadine and Riley, Rose, Peter and Julia.
LONDON, 1919
Two couples, both in love, both in tatters, come home to a changed world.
When childhood sweethearts Riley and Nadine marry, it is a blessing on the peace that now reigns. But the newlyweds and their old friends Peter and Julia Locke wear the ravages of the Great War in very different ways. Where Nadine and Riley do their best to forge ahead and muster hope, Peter retreats into drink and nightmares, unable to bear the domestic life for which Julia pines.
A letter, two lovers, a terrible lie. In war, truth is only the first casualty. ‘Inspires the kind of devotion among its readers not seen since David Nicholls’ One Day’ The Times
While Riley Purefoy and Peter Locke fight for their country, their survival and their sanity in the trenches of Flanders, Nadine Waveney, Julia Locke and Rose Locke do what they can at home. Beautiful, obsessive Julia and gentle, eccentric Peter are married: each day Julia goes through rituals to prepare for her beloved husband’s return. Nadine and Riley, only eighteen when the war starts, and with problems of their own already, want above all to make promises – but how can they when the future is not in their hands? And Rose? Well, what did happen to the traditionally brought-up women who lost all hope of marriage, because all the young men were dead?
Moving between Ypres, London and Paris, My Dear I Wanted to Tell You is a deeply affecting, moving and brilliant novel of love and war, and how they affect those left behind as well as those who fight.
Scintillating comic-romantic thriller, a finale to Louisa’s fab Egyptian trilogy: what life will Angeline choose?
The final volume in the Angeline Gower trilogy, following ‘Baby Love’ and ‘Desiring Cairo’.
Our angel is back. Angeline Gower is back home in Britain, back safe, back in her own bath. And, right on cue, that’s when trouble arrives, back for another bout with her. But this time she’s going to see it off for good….
There’s trouble in the form of her nemesis, her Russian roulette – wiseguy wideboy Eddie: he’s on the loose again, and who would the police send out to Egypt to trace him if not Evangeline? Then there’s trouble of another more painful, more joyful sort altogether: the trouble she has choosing between safe, solid, sensitive Harry, and hot, haughty, harmonious Sa’id. So, out among the sensuous wonders of Luxor, on the mobile and on the hoof, our angel shimmies and swerves with all her ex-belly dancer’s supple style through a series of emotional chicanes. Now and again, in a particularly tight corner, she spins off, but she always regains control and surges forward to seize the life and future she deserves for those she loves and, triumphantly, for herself.
A fast-paced literary thriller in which ex-belly dancer Evangeline’s fight to protect three-year-old Lily draws her into the seedy underworld of her past – the first book in Louisa Young’s celebrated Anglo-Egyptian trilogy of Evangeline Gower novels.
Evangeline is a single parent whose child is the daughter of her sister, who was killed in a motorbike accident. Evangeline, who was driving the bike, sustained injuries which put an end to her belly dancing career. She now leads an exemplary life, writing and looking after Lily. But when she gets into trouble with the police, she is drawn into the shadowy world of drug dealers, pornographers and bent coppers that seems to have bizarre connections with her sister’s past.
With a plot that makes you rush to the end, this is a thriller without violence, a romance without sentiment and a brilliantly exciting novel.
