This family saga set in a country house at the end of the second world war is a warm, funny exploration of domestic life and social change

A Labour general election landslide brings hope and new opportunities for some and a chill threat to wealth, status and influence for others. Topical stuff, but this is 1945, not 2024. Lissa Evans’s seventh novel for adults introduces a family of minor landed gentry who fetch up on the other side of the war not only broke, but with the Lady of the house complaining that “she could almost have drawn a graph charting the slow decrease in the depth of curtseys she’d received”.

The Vere-Thissetts have been in this corner of Buckinghamshire since the early 15th century. Their home, Dimperley Manor, is a hotchpotch of turrets, domes, follies and other architectural whims and afterthoughts that now share consistency only in their comprehensive decrepitude. During the war, the house was requisitioned as a maternity hospital. It is returned to the family with “the scents of beeswax and wood-smoke displaced by the lingering smell of disinfectant”.