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

'The nightly routine of sirens, barrage, the probing raider, the unmistakable engine ("Where are you? Where are you? Where are you?"), the bomb-bursts moving nearer and then moving away, hold one like a love-charm' Graham GreeneWhen 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 gruelling 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 defence 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.