Join Lucy Easthope, the UK’s top emergency planner, as she talks about her new book Come What May and shares life-changing lessons on recovery learnt through a life working in disaster.
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.
Lucy’s first book When the Dust Settles was a Sunday Times bestseller and a Radio Four Book of the Week. We look forward to welcoming her back to Booka to celebrate the publication of Come What May.
We all NEED this book! An essential guide to navigating the disasters each of us will have to face, written with the brilliant wisdom of a leading expert with the insightful compassion of a survivor. — Gaia Vince
Lucy Easthope is a shining beacon of sense and wisdom. None of us can avoid life-changing upheavals – but we can all benefit from reading this brilliant book about how to respond with resilience. Fascinating and empowering. — RACHEL CLARKE
Lucy Easthope is the UK’s leading authority on recovering from disaster. She has been an advisor for nearly every major disaster of the past two decades, including the 2004 tsunami, 9/11, the Salisbury poisonings, Grenfell, the Covid-19 pandemic and most recently the war in Ukraine. She challenges others to think differently about what comes next after tragic events, and how to plan for future ones.
Tickets: £10 without book (Admits One, ticket redeemable against a signed copy of Come What May) or £20 with book (Admits One, includes a signed copy of Come What May).