For years my wife has been telling me I need to read Nancy Mitford’s The Pursuit of Love. It’s not that I didn’t think it would appeal to me; I just needed the right excuse. That finally came this summer when it was chosen for one of our book clubs. I’m so glad it did. From the first paragraph to the closing lines, I was drawn in by Mitford’s brilliant blend of comedy and tragedy.

The novel begins with a description of a photograph: Aunt Sadie Radlett and her six children gathered around the tea table at Alconleigh. In the snapshot, the children remain perpetually young, “held like flies in the amber of that moment,” even though life quickly moves on — “the minutes, the days, the years, the decades, taking them further and further from that happiness and promise of youth, from the hopes Aunt Sadie must have had for them, and from the dreams they dreamed themselves.”

The story is narrated by Fanny, a cousin to the Radlett children, who spent her summers visiting them at Alconleigh. There, in that eccentric household, the children grow up dreaming about love, freedom, and the future, influenced in part by the adults (some of them quite chaotic) in their orbit. Fanny’s own mother — nicknamed “the Bolter” — is often away with a new lover, leaving Fanny to be raised by her more conventional and responsible aunt, Emily. But this is not necessarily the story of Fanny. She’s telling the story of her cousin Linda.

What do these children imagine for their futures? Raised between two World Wars, what kind of lives will they be able to create for themselves? These questions hum beneath the comedy, and I think Fanny is asking them too. Though she mostly sits at the margins of the action, Fanny’s voice is steady, observant, and deeply affectionate. She tells us Linda’s story, not as an outsider exactly, but as someone who’s always been a little adjacent to the kind of wild longing that defines Linda’s life. In doing so, she’s also quietly working through her own past: the absence of her mother, her upbringing by the dutiful Aunt Emily, and her witness to the Radletts’ often ridiculous — but wondrous and now vanished — world.

As she describes how Linda throws herself — seemingly foolishly — headlong into each new hope, Fanny’s narration still suggests deep love and admiration for her cousin, even when she doesn’t fully understand Linda and her refusal to settle. Through Linda, Fanny seems to be working through her own complicated feelings about love, freedom, and the elusive promise of happiness.

The novel’s final pages moved me deeply. The reappearance of the Bolter — who sees in Linda a reflection of herself — strikes a bittersweet note, especially as Fanny seems to recognize both the similarities and the crucial differences. I immediately returned to the start of the book to reread that opening paragraph about the photograph, and the whole book snapped into place: this is a story not just about love, but about memory, loss, and the fleetingness of youth and hope. Linda chased a life she could never quite catch, and Fanny, in telling her story, honors that pursuit without trying to explain it away. I’m so glad I finally read this book.