How I Live Now was Meg Rosoff's debut novel published by Penguin in 2004. It won the Guardian and Branford Boase Awards and was shortlisted for the Orange Prize for New Fiction as well as the Whitbread. It garnered the sort of rave acclaim most writers only ever dream of. Mark Haddon, author of The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night Time, championed it right from the beginning, saying, 'That rare, rare thing, a first novel with a sustained, magical and utterly faultless voice. After five pages I knew that she could persuade me to believe almost anything.'
At heart a story about falling in love, How I Live Now captures the confusion of adolescence especially at a time when the world is turned upside down. When Daisy first arrives in England she falls in love with a new way of life and also, passionately, with her cousin Edmund. When war breaks out, the two teenagers are swept apart. Everyone is struggling for survival. Daisy and Edmund both come through but while Daisy copes with the altered state of things, Edmund’s suffering when his world implodes changes him. He loses a part of himself that can never be replaced. How I Live Now subtly charts a jagged journey of finding out which captures the confusion of adolescence, especially when the world is turned upside down.
"Every war has turning points and every person too."
Fifteen-year-old Daisy is sent from Manhattan to England to visit her aunt and cousins she's never met: three boys near her age, and their little sister. Her aunt goes away on business soon after Daisy arrives. The next day bombs go off as London is attacked and occupied by an unnamed enemy.
As power fails, and systems fail, the farm becomes more isolated. Despite the war, it's a kind of Eden, with no adults in charge and no rules, a place where Daisy's uncanny bond with her cousins grows into something rare and extraordinary. But the war is everywhere, and Daisy and her cousins must lead each other into a world that is unknown in the scariest, most elemental way.