Sunday Telegraph
Poignant and inspiring.
Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly
This novel about a 17-year-old girl's move from a fishing village in France to London in the aftermath of WW II was first published in 1950. (Jan.)
From the Publisher
The World My Wilderness . . . had a powerful effect on me as a young reader, growing up in post-war London. Its landscape of bombed churches and derelict streets powerfully expresses Macaulay's sense of desolation during and after the war, for herself and for Europe—Guardian
Poignant and inspiring—Sunday Telegraph
Her penultimate novel, The World My Wilderness(1950), an elegiac, evocative depiction of the aftermath of the Second World War . . . A book born of loss and destruction. It deals in the grim realities of a civilization that's brought itself to the brink—Paris Review
JUNE 2024 - AudioFile
Clare Corbett's sympathetic performance of Rose Macaulay's 1950 novel about the costs of war highlights its mix of the satiric and the heartfelt. When 17-year-old Barbary is sent to live with her conventional father in London after growing up semi-wild in southern France with her mother, she finds adventure and comfort among the vagabonds and criminals who inhabit London's bombed-out neighborhoods. Corbett's choice of a light, sometimes childlike, voice for Barbary emphasizes her naïveté and self-centeredness. Her father sounds appropriately stiff, while her mother's mix of charm and toughness is apparent in Corbett's mellifluous but resolute delivery. As does Macaulay's writing, Corbett builds audio portraits that evoke sympathy and ridicule, often simultaneously. Thus, she creates a fine interpretation of this period-specific yet timeless novel. A.C.S. © AudioFile 2024, Portland, Maine
