Come What May: An uplifting guide to navigating hard times from the UK's leading expert on recovery

An uplifting guide to navigating hard times from the leading expert on recovery

'A shining beacon of sense and wisdom. We can all benefit from reading this brilliant book about how to respond with resilience.' RACHEL CLARKE
'An unlikely superhero' SUNDAY TIMES
'An amazing woman' JAMES O'BRIEN

At some point in life, we will all 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 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. Lucy grew up in Liverpool and has a degree in law, a PhD in medicine and a Masters in risk, crisis and disaster management. She is a Professor in Practice of Risk and Hazard at the University of Durham, a Fellow in Mass Fatalities and Pandemics at the University of Bath and a Research Associate at the Joint Centre for Disaster Research, Massey University, New Zealand.