Sarah Watling

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Tomorrow Perhaps the Future

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Glorious... The stories are so beautifully rendered, so powerful

A fascinating study... Watling's protagonists are flawed but brave, battling fascism with guts.

In her engrossing and impressive book, Sarah Watling looks at some of those women who went to war, not just to fight fascism or scratch the itch of adventure but also to show what women could do.

Provocative, compelling narratives of women on the front lines of fighting fascism... A powerful, moving cautionary tale for today.

Helen Zia, author of The Last Boat Out of Shanghai

Watling's study marks her determination to write women into the history books... This is a serious, scholarly work, which also brings her group of writers, poets and activists vividly to life.

A brilliant, impassioned, and much-needed tribute to the women who used their art to fight fascism... Extraordinary and captivating.

Watling's narrative, inserting vivid glimpses of the conflict to situate her shuffling of a deck of characters who themselves embodied complex and evolving ideas, is expertly balanced.

Fascinating... Sarah Watling brings alive with great vividness a small cast of disparate characters who travelled to Spain during the Civil War... Watling brings all these passionate characters together with great aplomb.

Watling deploys a wealth of firsthand testimony and archival materials, not in service of a conventional work of history but in an extended consideration of contemporary concerns.

In her exhilarating book, Sarah Watling follows a handful of brilliant intellectuals as they wrestle with the nature of duty in a morally complicated world.

Group biographies are notoriously hard to write. But Watling knits together with considerable skill... She also intersperses her narrative with perceptive commentary.

Fascinating and compellingly readable.

Paul Preston, author of The Spanish Holocaust

Beautifully written. It evocatively and incisively weaves together the experiences of a select group of remarkable women in war... This book is not only very readable but also thought-provoking... The resonance of the book in our conflicted world is all too evident, existentially and morally.

Brings the Spanish Civil War to freshly vivid life... She makes us feel their urgency as our own.

A corrective to those more publicised accounts from male writers reporting on the civil war... She's particularly fine on the question of confrontation or evasion when it comes to great evils, that writing in times of crisis is not for fence-sitters.

History that hums with the urgency of now.

An intimate and nuanced exploration of what animated and sustained a group of prominent foreigners who took sides in the mortal ideological struggle against fascism that was the Spanish Civil War.

Following Writers and Rebels in the Spanish Civil War

Brought to you by Penguin. 
 
In our age of political divisions, this portrait of the women outsiders who took part in the Spanish Civil War asks questions of solidarity and resistance. 
 
In the 1930s, women and men from across the world made their way to Spain to be part of what they saw as a historic fight for freedom from fascism. Tomorrow Perhaps the Future follows extraordinary outsiders who were determined to live out their lives with courage and conviction. 
 
Sarah Watling weaves together the experiences of a host of writers and activists, including Nancy Cunard, Martha Gellhorn, Jessica Mitford and Virginia Woolf, and searches out the stories of the photographer Gerda Taro and the Harlem nurse Salaria Kea. Throughout, she explores solidarity, art and resistance, finding answers that are as vital today as they were almost a century ago. 
 
'Glorious... so beautifully rendered, so powerful' 
ANNA FUNDER, author of Wifedom 
 
‘A fascinating study’ 
OBSERVER 
 
‘Engrossing and impressive’ 
NEW STATESMAN 
 
* A NEW YORKER BOOK OF THE YEAR * 
 
©2023 Sarah Watling (P)2023 Penguin Audio

Writers, Rebels and the Spanish Civil War

'Now, as certainly never before, we are determined or compelled to take sides.' Nancy Cunard 
 
In the 1930s, women and men from across Britain, Europe and America made their way to Spain to be part of what they identified as a historic fight for freedom from fascism. Tomorrow Perhaps the Future follows a handful of extraordinary outsiders who were determined to live out their lives with courage and conviction. 
 
Sarah Watling weaves together the journeys of the young American journalist Martha Gellhorn and the seasoned radical Josephine Herbst; the British writers and partners Sylvia Townsend Warner and Valentine Ackland; the aristocratic rebel Jessica Mitford and the maverick poet Nancy Cunard, drawing in their responses to the Spanish Civil War in both literature and life. She considers the wary position of Virginia Woolf, trying and failing to keep the conflict out of her family, and searches out the stories of African-American nurse Salaria Kea, Jewish photographer Gerda Taro and others, tracing their decisions to face up to history. For each woman, Spain became a defining episode of her life, a place where many of them found a freedom unthinkable at home. 
 
A year into the struggle, Nancy Cunard took an urgent poll of contemporary writers asking the question straight: which side are you on? In our age of political divisions and war, Tomorrow Perhaps the Future is a book that asks questions of solidarity, resistance and the arts, which explores how we respond to the need to declare a side, and how we know when that moment - the moment to step forward - has arrived.

Tomorrow Perhaps the Future

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Sarah Watling

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