Lara Feigel

Restless Lives in the Second World War. A powerful wartime chronicle told through the eyes of five prominent writers: Elizabeth Bowen, Graham Greene, Hilde Spiel, Rose Macaulay, and Henry Yorke (writing as Henry Green). Volunteering as ambulance drivers, fire-fighters and ARP wardens, they were the successors to the soldier poets of WWI and their story has never been told. Opening with a meticulous evocation of a single night in September 1940, the author brilliantly and beautifully interweaves letters, diaries and fiction with official civil defence records to chart the history of a burning world in wartime London and post-war Vienna and Berlin.

Lara Feigel listens to birds outside her window - their circling, strident calls - and thinks of D. H. Lawrence. It is the spring of 2020 and, as the pandemic takes hold, she locks down in rural Oxfordshire with her partner, her two children, and that most explosive of writers. Proceeding month by month through the year, she sets out to start again with Lawrence: to find vital literary companionship; to use him as a guide to rural living and even, unexpectedly, to child-rearing; to find a way through his writing to excavate the modern world she feels he helped bring into being. Tracing the arc of Lawrence's life and delving deep into his writings, she confronts his anger, his passion, his tumultuous vitality. In the process, she faces some of today's most urgent dilemmas, from secular religion to the climate crisis, from sex and sexuality to feminism's ideas about motherhood. And, as she watches the seasons change alongside Lawrence, Feigel finds the rhythms of her own life shifting in unexpected ways. Brilliantly interweaving literary criticism, biography and memoir, Look! We Have Come Through! is a captivating exhumation of an author and a compelling manifesto for exposing ourselves to difficult and dangerous views.