‘Poignant and inspiring’ SUNDAY TELEGRAPH
‘The World My Wilderness . . . had a powerful effect on me as a young reader’ HERMIONE LEE, GUARDIAN
‘An elegiac, evocative depiction of the aftermath of the Second World War’ PARIS REVIEW
It is 1946 and the people of France and England are facing the aftermath of the War. Sent by her beautiful, indolent mother to England, Barbary Deniston is thrown into the care of her distinguished father and conventional stepmother. Barbary has spent her childhood years in the sunshine of Provence. During the War, she ran wild with the Maquis, experiencing collaboration, betrayal and resistance. In peacetime the young woman has been taken away from all she knows and placed into the drab austerity of post-war London life.
Confused and unhappy, she discovers the flowering bomb craters around St Paul’s Cathedral. Here, in the bombed heart of London, with the outcasts living on the edge of society, she finds an echo of the wilderness of Provence and is forced to confront the wilderness within herself.
‘The World My Wilderness . . . had a powerful effect on me as a young reader’ HERMIONE LEE, GUARDIAN
‘An elegiac, evocative depiction of the aftermath of the Second World War’ PARIS REVIEW
It is 1946 and the people of France and England are facing the aftermath of the War. Sent by her beautiful, indolent mother to England, Barbary Deniston is thrown into the care of her distinguished father and conventional stepmother. Barbary has spent her childhood years in the sunshine of Provence. During the War, she ran wild with the Maquis, experiencing collaboration, betrayal and resistance. In peacetime the young woman has been taken away from all she knows and placed into the drab austerity of post-war London life.
Confused and unhappy, she discovers the flowering bomb craters around St Paul’s Cathedral. Here, in the bombed heart of London, with the outcasts living on the edge of society, she finds an echo of the wilderness of Provence and is forced to confront the wilderness within herself.
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Reviews
Poignant and inspiring
Her penultimate novel, The World My Wilderness (1950), an elegiac, evocative depiction of the aftermath of the Second World War . . . A book born of loss and destruction. It deals in the grim realities of a civilization that's brought itself to the brink
The World My Wilderness . . . had a powerful effect on me as a young reader, growing up in post-war London. Its landscape of bombed churches and derelict streets powerfully expresses Macaulay's sense of desolation during and after the war, for herself and for Europe
