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The World My Wilderness

  • Author
    • Rose Macaulay
Format
Regular price £9.99
Regular price Sale price £9.99
It is 1946 and the people of France and England are facing the aftermath of the war. Banished by her beautiful, indolent mother to England, Barbary Deniston is thrown into the care of her distinguished father and conventional stepmother. Having grown up in the sunshine of Provence, allowed to run wild with the Maquis, experienced collaboration, betrayal and death, Barbary finds it hard to adjust to the drab austerity of postwar London life.

Confused and unhappy, she discovers one day the flowering wastes around St Paul's. Here, in the bombed heart of London, she finds an echo of the wilderness of Provence and is forced to confront the wilderness within herself.
  • Published: Feb 08 2018
  • Pages: 256
  • 129 x 198mm
  • ISBN: 9780349010007
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Press Reviews

  • Hermione Lee

    Guardian
    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
  • Sunday Telegraph
    Poignant and inspiring
  • Paris Review
    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