Book review: So Much Life Left Over, by Louis De Bernières

The Guardian once reported that Louis De Bernières had made so much money from Captain Corelli’s Mandolin that he would have no need ever to work again. Happily, need or not, he continues to write, and So Much Life Left Over is a richly enjoyable, agreeably old-fashioned novel. It begins in Ceylon, where Daniel Pitt, a First World War flying ace, is managing a tea estate, and it covers the inter-war years, mostly in England, to reach a fairly bleak conclusion early in the Hitler War.