How I Live Now

How I Live Now takes readers to a speculative present where earth is gripped by another global war and 15-year-old Daisy is sent from her New York City home to a rural farm in the U.K. to stay with extended family. At first rattled by the change, Daisy eventually grows close to her relatives. Those bonds deepen, and grow more complicated, when she and her 14-year-old cousin Edmond fall in love. (Author Meg Rosoff has said in interviews that she did not set out to create controversy with Daisy and Edmond’s love story. “It’s not illegal in most places of the world to marry your cousin and, to be honest, I never gave it a second thought,” she told Mic in 2013.) The teens’ lives are upended further when the U.K. is invaded by foreign powers and the family is removed from the farm, driven apart from each other and confronted by the horrors of war. The 2004 novel, which was Rosoff’s debut, won the British Guardian Children’s Fiction Prize and the American Michael L. Printz Award before being adapted into a film starring Saoirse Ronan, George MacKay and Tom Holland. —Peter Allen Clark

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