How I Live Now

Troubled and troublesome, fifteen-year-old Daisy (her choice of name, originally Elizabeth) is sent to live with her eccentric cousins in rural England, a stark contrast to her apartment life in New York. Her mother died giving birth to her, and her fraught relationship with her pregnant stepmother has taken her along a self-destructive path of anorexia nervosa. Not long after she arrives in the UK, her mother’s sister, Aunt Penn, travels to Oslo to a peace summit, and war breaks out in England. Despite bombings in London (p25), initially all proceeds much as usual for the self-sufficient group of Osbert, Isaac, Edmond, Piper and Daisy, except that Daisy and fourteen-year-old Edmond fall into a passionate relationship. Then the war and occupation intrudes, the cousins are separated with Piper and Daisy being sent to stay in a distant village, and it becomes a matter of survival for them. The two make their way back to the farm, and then Daisy is abruptly repatriated.