The World My Wilderness

by Rose Macaulay

Book Overview

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.

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• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0349010005
• ISBN13: 9780349010007
• Release Date: April 2018
• Publisher: Virago Press (UK)
• Length: 256 Pages
• Weight: 0.40 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.8" x 5.0" x 7.7"

Customer Reviews

A fascinating main character

Not as strong as The Towers of Trebizond but a great read nonetheless. This is the novel that Macaulay--one of a number of now relatively unsung British women novelists of the 1950s who were so good (inc. Barbara Pym, Pamela Hansford Johnson, et al.)--wrote after her friends thought she'd given up novel-writing. It's an absorbing tale. The central character is someone who grows on you and your heart aches for her. The novel well conveys a world that is now invisible to tourists visiting London: the wreckage and ruin, physical and human, in the period immediately following the conclusion of the Second World War. Things have changed; morality and religion are not what they were. Macaulay knew this London well and her sentences are well constructed, her writing clear and effective, often beautiful. It's a novel that is well worth spending time with.

Lost in the ruins of postwar London

Barbary has been living happily with her divorced mother in the south of France, and has spent the war years as a junior member of the Resistance. Apparently she has been involved in the murder of her French stepfather, considered by the Reistance to be a collaborator, so her mother banishes her to london to live with the father she hasn't seen since she was a young child. She escapes from the tedium of her father's very conventional household with her stepbrother Raoul, and together they explore the London bombsites, and meet the people who hide there, army deserters and black marketeers. Barbary longs to return to France and her adored mother, but will her mother ever forgive her for her part in her stepfather's death? Barbary is a fascinating character, a teenager old beyond her years, intense and fierce, and hopelssly lost in her father's narrow, conventional world. Not as funny as some of Rose macaulay's other novels, but a fascinating and absorbing story.