Come What May

Life-changing lessons on recovery learnt through a life working in disaster - from the UK's top emergency planner.

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'An unlikely superhero' Sunday Times


'An amazing woman' James O'Brien


'Easthope is that rare thing, a genuine philosopher thinking through what she is doing in the mitigation of human suffering' New Statesman


We all know that at some point in life, we will experience pain, uncertainty and loss. Widowhood, redundancy, a life-changing diagnosis, pregnancy loss, or a global pandemic. So how can we weather the storms, and cope with whatever comes next?


No one can answer this better than Lucy Easthope, an emergency planner whose job is to support survivors of major disasters. She has been there after countless earthquakes, fires and floods. Time and again she has watched how people rebuild: the work, the pitfalls and the fragile joy. In Come What May, she distils for us what she has learned about how to carry on during and after terrible times.


Through poignant stories and hard-won wisdom, she offers a roadmap for resilience in the face of adversity. She explains what shape the recovery journey might take, how to triage your life in an emergency, how to plan for 'the slump' (also known as the lasagne phase), how to take stock of what has happened to you, how to watch out for 'learned helplessness', and what good (and bad) help looks like.


This is a book for all of us existing in 'the after' who want not just to survive, but to live and unleash strengths we never knew we had.