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Come What May

Life-Changing Lessons for Coping with Crisis

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Come What May

By: Lucy Easthope
Narrated by: Lucy Easthope
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About this listen

 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

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.©2025 Lucy Easthope (P)2025 Hodder & Stoughton Limited Adventurers, Explorers & Survival Human Geography Personal Development Personal Success Politicians Politics & Activism Psychology Psychology & Mental Health Social Sciences Natural Disaster Survival
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This is an inspiring and revealing look behind disaster. The human impact of disaster on those caught up in the thinkable is retold here. The layers and complexity offer an insight into the considerations and decisions taken by those who start us on the road to recovery.

Human’s behind disaster

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I was pointed towards this sane and humble book hearing Lucy on Radio 4. A remarkable woman in a world of too few role models.

Being currently signed off of work following several life events; the death of my dog, sizeable changes at work, a house (and town) move, the eventual breakdown over Christmas of a difficult three year relationship.

Following, I felt I needed to step back from community roles due to my overwhelming sense of sadness, only to find long-standing, deeply intertwined friends, those who’d helped me move home to be closer to them and counselled me on leaving my relationship suddenly stepping back from me (big marks on the Homes-Rahe Life Stress Reajustment Rating Scale!)

I write about my own losses mainly as context. With such world events as now and a steady stream of tragedy flowing via rolling news, one can often feel a compounded stress, of feeling like a fraud or that a good kick up the ass maybe all that’s required….as a mental health professional, I’m aware I often hold my resilience to different standards than others and am a little too prone to uncompassionate self-talk.

Lucy’s reassures that disaster takes many forms, it can be both very loud but also quiet and creeping. The book felt like a warm and sturdy lifeboat, giving me an opportunity to breathe and look around at what had felt (and feels) like my own private disaster.

The book offers practical, evidence-based pointers for troubled hearts based on her career as a disaster response planner. She avoids the dramatic in favour of a cool, human and nurturing approach. Vital are that these tools are not esoteric or difficult to understand or use. They are just real, helpful and trustworthy.

Each chapter offers a “Lesson.” Beginning by taking a look at what’s happened and what to expect of the different phases we go through in tragedy’s wake. She advises on avoiding “bad help” and discerning hope from “hopium.” The lessons contain powerful and easy to adopt tools such as reframing the victim yoke which can disempower or weigh you down and examining your own motivations.

A personal “impact assessment” may seem like the last thing one would want to consider however, this is obviously rattling freely around the skull already and there is great benefit from auditing our losses first before we can assess how best to heal or even contemplate rebuilding.

This is a book which promises no flashy, quick fixes or self-improvement “jazz” but rather permeates your soul and sits with you like a good friend who knows when to offer solutions and when to just let you cry, bitch, swear or not speak at all. Most importantly for me; there was none of the relentless optimism you can find yourself resenting.

It was a good decision to narrate her own book. I was really comforted by her simple authenticity & the sincerity demonstrated through her bravely sharing her own personal disasters.

Come What May stays with you. It’s so well considered and constructed. For me it’s acted as a grounding and calm springboard to the other works she kindly suggests.

I’m truly grateful for this book and to Lucy Easthope for putting her “lessons” out there. I’ll share this with people going forward.

Sensible, compassionate. Simply human

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Thank you Lucy- a wonderful, crafted and thoughtfully presented journey through emergencies, our responses and learning as well as practical tips for our own emergency planning. As a palliative care physician, I love the way you have weaved through the human loss and response to that and the way palliative care supports living well before the dying well. Words matter, the nuance matters and this book captures all that and more.

Hot chocolate and sage advice beautifully crafted

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This is excellent- a great mix of real life events, theory and practical tips. I will be getting her other books next month and may likely buy it in a hard copy for reference

Excellent- Reassuring & practical

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Practical advice given in the sensible and deeply compassionate way that Lucy Easthope works and moves through the world.

practical and moving

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