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One of the only unambiguous extended pleasures I experienced in 2020 was that of reading all five volumes of “The Cazalet Chronicles,” by Elizabeth Jane Howard, back to back. “Sunlight refurbished the room,” Howard writes, in the first paragraph, “making toffee of the linoleum, turning the chips on the white enamel washstand jug slate blue.” That calm, bright, tarnished deliciousness—the immediate re-attunement of your attention to the slow secret unfolding of a summer’s day—that’s just what it feels like to read these books, which refract the political and social upheaval of the twenty years surrounding the Second World War through the life of an upper-middle-class English family.

“The Cazalet Chronicles” is the sort of series, like “Wolf Hall” or “The Three-Body Problem” or the Patrick Melrose novels, that inspires active jealousy within me when a friend goes in for the first time. But, unlike the other occupants of this category, “The Cazalet Chronicles” remain shockingly underread and underpraised. Hilary Mantel once supposed that Howard’s work was dismissed both because of her private life (she married Kingsley Amis, and counted Arthur Koestler and Cecil Day-Lewis among her many suitors) and because of the centrality of the domestic in her work. Howard’s was the sort of fiction that’s thought, Mantel wrote, to be by women and for women; novels that “seldom try to startle or provoke the reader; on the contrary, though the narrative may unfold ingeniously, every art is employed to make the reader at ease within it.” Of course, the home—even and especially one as luscious as the Cazalet countryside estate—is the site of a thousand turns and deceptions and revelations, heightened by the comfort that both the reader and the characters feel. My best pitch for “The Cazalet Chronicles”: they’re a cross between Laurie Colwin and Elena Ferrante, with more than a bit of the Evan S. Connell masterpiece “Mrs. Bridge.” Read these books before they get the inevitable makeover and reissue that they’re due.