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  • Published: 13 June 2016
  • ISBN: 9780241966037
  • Imprint: Penguin General UK
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 272
  • RRP: $34.99
Categories:

Noonday




The Booker-winning author of the definitive First World War trilogy, Regeneration, turns for the first time to the Second World War

London, the Blitz, autumn 1940. Ambulance drivers Elinor Brooke and Kit Neville ferry injured survivors from bombsites to hospitals while Elinor's husband Paul works as an air-raid warden. Once fellow students at the Slade School of Fine Art, before the First World War destroyed the hopes of their generation, now all three find themselves caught in another war. And as the bombing intensifies, old loves and obsessions resurface until Elinor is brought face to face with an almost impossible choice.

Completing the story of Elinor, Paul and Kit that began with Life Class and continued with Toby's Room, Noonday is both a stand-alone novel and the climax of a trilogy. Pat Barker brings the besieged and haunted city of London to electrifying life in her most powerful novel since the Regeneration trilogy.

  • Published: 13 June 2016
  • ISBN: 9780241966037
  • Imprint: Penguin General UK
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 272
  • RRP: $34.99
Categories:

About the author

Pat Barker

Pat Barker was born in Yorkshire and began her literary career in her late thirties, when she took a short writing course taught by Angela Carter. She has published sixteen novels, including her masterful Regeneration Trilogy which includes the Booker Prize-winning The Ghost Road. The Silence of the Girls was shortlisted for the Women's Prize for Fiction and won an Independent Bookshop Award 2019. The Women of Troy was a number one Sunday Times bestseller. The Voyage Home continues the series.

Also by Pat Barker

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Praise for Noonday

Barker's command of detail and gift for metaphor are as sharp as ever: her evocation of the bombed city is steeped in drama... Noonday is in the first rank

Mail on Sunday

Tremendously good

Daily Mail

This is the first time the author of the Regeneration Trilogy has written about the Second World War and it's a triumph

Stylist

Many strokes of genius from Barker... accessible and moving

Sunday Times

Noonday's Blitz-era setting gives Barker ample opportunity to do what she does best

Spectator

Powerful and vivid, with nuanced characters and Barker's unerring eye for detail

Women and Home

Bold, hard-hitting, unforgettable... a virtuoso rendition of the bombing, as huge swathes of London blaze away with the brightest of bright lights... Barker shows us how the city's finest moment was indubitably also its most terrifying, with luminous and unsparing insight

Independent on Sunday

Ambitious, vivid, sharp... The closer you get to the end, the more lives need saving and the more thwarted and complicated the domestic backdrop... Barker's chronological leap is a sophisticated bridge between the drama of the present and the haunted history of the past

Daily Telegraph

Colourfully alive, fizzes with energy... the novel's point of view swivel[s] like a torchbeam to illuminate London's devastated streets

Independent

The book has its own inherent power thanks to Barker's skilful rendering of the texture of the period but it is richer and more rewarding if read with the other two volumes of this beautifully crafted trilogy

Daily Express

Publisher's description. Pat Barker brings the besieged and haunted city of Blitz-era London to electrifying life in Noonday, the third and final novel in her 'Life Class Trilogy'. Bombs are falling on London and, still suffering from the losses of the Great War, Elinor, Paul and Kit must face war's horrors once again...

Penguin