Daisy is 15, anorexic, and living with a distant father and a despised, pregnant stepmother. To escape this domestic torment Daisy takes herself off to visit her dead mother's eccentric English family.
She unexpectedly falls in love with their bohemian way of life, rambling country home, and with the four cousins themselves – in particular, 14-year old Edmond.
But what begins as a satisfyingly happy blend of familiar literary conventions veers off in another direction entirely when war breaks out. The children are separated, and the mood darkens into a harrowing vision of the effects of occupation and conflict on the idyllic landscape and its inhabitants. Yet even as Daisy struggles to find her way home amidst the death and destruction, she is sustained by her love for her newfound family.
Some critics have suggested similarities between How I Live Now and The Catcher in the Rye or I Capture the Castle, but Rosoff was not influenced by either book – she didn't even read Dodie Smith's novel until after her own was completed. Instead, the books that left a lasting impression on her are those she read as a younger child, and it is one of these - Madeleine L'Engle's A Wrinkle in Time - that made the biggest impact on Rosoff.
'It certainly was the book that always stuck in my head,' she says. 'Mrs Whatsit gives Meg the gift of her faults. And she says: 'What do I want my faults for? They're plaguing me already.' And of course in the end it's the faults that save her. And that made such an impression on me, the idea that you could be saved by your faults.'
Rosoff's ease in creating Daisy's authentic teenage voice stems from her own vivid memories of adolescence. She recalls clearly the difficulties of having frizzy hair and feeling unattractive, as well as her youthful conviction that adults were old well before they reached middle age.
I used to wonder, 'why do I have to stand here at this bus-stop? Why can't I just close my eyes and blink myself home?
It's unsurprising then that she bristles slightly when taken to task by a reviewer who criticises Daisy's casual indifference to the death of '7,000 or 70,000' people, mainly adults, in a London bomb. Unpalatable as it may be, says Rosoff, this is the way children really think. 'I remember when my mother's brother died and I was 15, well old enough to know better. And I remember thinking, 'Well, he was 44, he'd had a good life.' That's what it feels like when you're that age. When you're 15 you think old is 30.'
Rosoff feels that writing for teenagers brings with it a particular freedom to explore the line between fantasy and reality. 'You've got this whole pool of characters undergoing massive transitions in their lives,' she says. 'Also, it's a time when being close to the edge of insanity is very normal. You're not quite sure what world you're in. In school you learn about the wonders of the human body and brain. I used to wonder, 'why do I have to stand here at this bus-stop? Why can't I just close my eyes and blink myself home? If we are really fabulous inventions of some omnipotent God, why do I have to walk?'
I'm not interested in fantasy writing as a genre but I'm interested in the line between fantasy and reality. It works better, more easily with children than with adults. So How I Live Now takes place five or maybe seven weeks in the future. Working in fantasy you can keep the details slightly vague.
The book's apparent parallels with the current situation in Iraq has made many readers assume that the war in How I Live Now, with its bands of guerrillas roaming the countryside and terrorists bombing London, arises out of events taking place there. But although the Iraq war was certainly in her mind, Rosoff was even more affected by the war in Bosnia. 'Although everyone said 'Iraq, Iraq, Iraq', for me it was actually Yugoslavia that made a massive impression,' she says. 'There was so much that sense of doctors and lawyers and university professors ... there was no way to say, as people do when there's a war somewhere, 'they're not really like us'. Which is a desperate thing to do, but I think it's the way people distance themselves from war. But that whole business in Bosnia felt so immediate and so close to home that you felt it could easily happen here. In a way I did want kids to come out of it thinking 'This is close to home and this could happen and we don't want it.''
To drive her point home, she illustrates the grimness of war in gory detail, refusing to make allowances for the age of her readers; in a particularly graphic scene, she describes plump foxes feasting on corpses after a massacre. 'I was terribly worried about anyone having any possibility of glamorising what they were going through. I didn't want it to look like a fun adventure in the woods.'
There's no danger of that. Daisy and her cousins experience fully the emotional and psychological damage inflicted by war. Yet it's not all bleak. Daisy matures as a result of her experiences. Her determination to protect nine-year-old Piper and to discover the fate of her other cousins brings out qualities of courage and selflessness that the spoiled kid from New York would probably fail to recognise. It also makes her see her anorexia in a different light.
As Rosoff points out, 'You don't imagine that people struggling with an occupied country or city would run off to get Prozac all the time. Which is not to say they aren't depressed, but their lives are so fully engaged in survival that survival is what occupies them and what gives their lives meaning. And Daisy, whose life clearly had all the trappings of privilege, but who was clearly unable to find any happiness within that or any sense of self, at the end says 'I found that fighting back is what I'm good at'. It does give her purpose. Saving other people is what saves you.'
