The Love-Charm of Bombs: Restless Lives in the Second World War

By Lara Feigel

Book Overview

When the first bombs fell on London in August 1940, the city was transformed overnight into a battlefront. For most Londoners, the sirens, guns, planes and bombs heralded grueling nights of sleeplessness, fear and loss. But for Graham Greene and some of his contemporaries, this was a bizarrely euphoric time when London became the setting for intense love affairs and surreal beauty. At the height of the Blitz, Greene described the bomb-bursts as holding one 'like a love-charm.' As the sky whistled and the ground shook, nerves were tested, loyalties examined and infidelities begun.

The Love-charm of Bombs is a powerful wartime chronicle told through the eyes of five prominent writers: Elizabeth Bowen, Graham Greene, Rose Macaulay, Hilde Spiel and Henry Yorke (writing as Henry Green). Volunteering as ambulance drivers, fire-fighters and ARP wardens, these were the successors to the soldier poets of the First World War and their story has never been told. Now, opening with a meticulous evocation of a single night in September 1940, Lara Feigel brilliantly and beautifully interweaves letters, diaries and fiction with official civil defense records to chart the history of a burning world in wartime London and post-war Vienna and Berlin. She reveals the haunting, ecstatic, often wrenching stories that triumphed amid the mess of a war-torn world.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1408830906
• ISBN13: 9781408830901
• Release Date: June 2015
• Publisher: Bloomsbury Paperbacks
• Length: 528 Pages
• Weight: 1.55 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.3" x 5.1" x 7.8"