SO MUCH LIFE LEFT OVER

(Harvill Secker £16.99) FANS of Louis de Bernieres will know what to expect from this globe- trotting follow-up to 2015’s The Dust That Falls From Dreams, set in the years between World Wars I and II.

Centre stage among a sprawling cast of characters is given to a philandering ex-fighter pilot, Daniel, now running a tea factory in Twenties Ceylon and expecting a second child with his wife, Rosie.

The child is stillborn — a rawly depicted event in a multi-threaded storyline that generally proves more light-hearted as it cuts between Rosie’s three sisters and Daniel’s Ceylonese lover, with whom he has another child.

There are also letters from Daniel’s brother, a soldier in Pakistan, and segments following a gardener named Oily Wragge, whose cheeky-chappy narration revisiting World War I gives the uneasy sense of de Bernieres slumming it.

It’s uneven and perhaps overlong, but this tragicomic romp has a winning glint in its eye, delivering oodles of Downtonesque entertainment as it portrays a changing Britain poised uneasily on the brink of modernity.