Tomorrow Perhaps the Future

Get in the xigxag app
This book is not purchasable in your country. Please select another book.
Pre-order Buy Now £{{ price }}
How does xigxag pricing work?

Listen to a sample

What to expect

Brought to you by Penguin.

'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 paths of the American journalists Martha Gellhorn and 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, 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.

©2023 Sarah Watling (P)2023 Penguin Audio

Critics Review

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

    Observer

  • 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.

    New Statesman

  • 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.

    Daily Mail

  • 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.

    Mail on Sunday

  • 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.

    Times Literary Supplement

Subscribe to our newsletter

Sign up to get tailored content recommendations, product updates and info on new releases. Your data is your own: we commit to protect your data and respect your privacy.