Includes bibliographical references (pages [501]-505) and index.

Part I. One Night in the Lives of Five Writers : September 26, 1940 -- Newsreel -- 7 p.m. : Blackout -- 10 p.m. : Fire -- 1 a.m. : Rescue -- 6 a.m. : All Clear -- Part II. The Blitz : September 1940-May 1941 -- "War, she thought, was sex" -- "Ireland can be dementing" -- "How we shall survive this I don't know" -- "So much else is on the way to be lost" -- Part III. The Lull : June 1941-February 1944 -- " You are the ultimate of something" -- "Can pain and danger exist?" -- "Only at night I cry" -- "Alas, what hate everywhere" -- Part IV. Approaching Victory : June 1944-August 1945 -- "Droning things, mindlessly making for you" -- "A collective intoxication of happiness" -- "The days were listless and a flop" -- Part V. Surveying the Ruins : Postwar Europe, 1945-9 -- "The magic Irish light and the soft air" -- "Flying, no, leaping, into the centre of the mainland" -- "O, maybe we'll live a while in Killala" -- "The returning memory of a dream long forgotten" -- "The place I really did lose my heart to was Vienna" -- Part VI. Mid-century : Middle Age -- " We could have been happy for a lifetime" -- "Let us neither of us forget... what reality feels like and eternity is" -- "The world my wilderness, its caves my home."

"'The nightly routine of sirens, barrage, the probing raider, the unmistakable engine ... 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 strange kind of battlefield. For most Londoners, the sirens, guns, planes, and bombs brought sleepless nights, fear and loss. But for a group of writers, the war became an incomparably vivid source of inspiration, the blazing streets scenes of exhilaration in which fear could transmute into love. In this powerful chronicle of literary life under the Blitz, Lara Feigel vividly conjures the lives of five prominent writers: Elizabeth Bowen, Graham Greene, Rose Macaulay, Hilde Spiel and the novelist Henry Green. Starting with a sparklingly detailed recreation of a single night of September 1940, the narrative traces the tempestuous experiences of these five figures through five years in London and Ireland, followed by postwar Vienna and Berlin.Volunteering to drive ambulances, patrol the streets and fight fires, the protagonists all exhibited a unified spirit of a nation under siege, but as individuals their emotions were more volatile. As the sky whistled and the ground shook, nerves were tested, loyalties examined and torrid affairs undertaken. Literary historian and journalist Feigel brilliantly and beautifully interweaves the letters, diaries, journalism and fiction of her writers with official records to chart the history of a burning world, experienced through the eyes of extraordinary individuals."