LOVE ALL

Elizabeth Jane Howard (Pan Macmillan, £17.99)

The organisers of the Independent Woodstock Literary Festival seem to have found the perfect speaker in Elizabeth Jane Howard. Her latest novel features a group of characters, each wrestling with a private sadness, who are brought together when they organise an arts festival.

Howard's powerful writing shone through in her darkest novel Falling — a spooky anti-romance which should be kept well away from the vulnerable divorced and separated — and her moving autobiography Slipstream.

However, starting Love All, I found the writing strangely low-key and old-fashioned — she is 85 and there has been a six-year gap since Slipstream.

Perhaps this was why it took me a while to realise it is set in the late 1960s — I sat up with a start when someone suggests inviting Iris Murdoch to the festival in the small West Country town of Melton.

The festival is mooted by Jack Curtis, a self-made millionaire who has bought and refurbished the local stately home. He enlists the elderly Florence Plover to design his garden, and she brings her Anglo-Greek niece Persephone, suffering the end of a love affair with a married man.

Flo buys plants from the Musgrove siblings, Thomas and Mary, whose family originally owned Melton Hall, but now run a failing garden nursery nearby. Thomas lost his wife Celia in a car crash and Mary gave up her life to rescue him from grief and bring up his daughter Hatty. The impoverished household also includes Celia's brother Francis, a painter, and Celia's abominable father Reggie.

Howard gradually immerses us in their lives, meditating on how they come to love each other in different ways and why — or why not.

 Elizabeth Jane Howard will be at St Mary's Church, Woodstock, at 4pm on Saturday, October 11.