From the Booker Prize-winning and Women's Prize-shortlisted author of The Silence of the Girls

The final novel in Pat Barker's acclaimed 'Life Class' trilogy - an unforgettable story of art and war, from one of our greatest writers on war and the human heart

'Bold, hard-hitting, unforgettable, with luminous and unsparing insight' Independent on Sunday

'Barker's command of detail and gift for metaphor are as sharp as ever... Noonday is in the first rank' Mail on Sunday

'[There is] no end to her talent in describing how conflicts rupture the soul' Arifa Akbar, Independent

London, the Blitz, autumn 1940. As the bombs fall on the blacked-out city, ambulance driver Elinor Brooke races from bomb sites to hospitals trying to save the lives of injured survivors, working alongside former friend Kit Neville, while her husband Paul works as an air-raid warden. As the bombing intensifies, the constant risk of death makes all three of them reach out for quick consolation. Old loves and obsessions re-surface until Elinor is brought face to face with an almost impossible choice. Writing about the Second World War for the first time, Pat Barker brings the besieged and haunted city of London into electrifying life.

The Life Class trilogy:
Life Class
Toby's Room
Noonday

Our foremost literary chronicler of the First World War, Pat Barker turns her critical, compassionate eye on the brutality and terror of the Second.


About the Author
Pat Barker was born in Yorkshire and began her literary career in her forties, 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.

Reviews
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 *
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 *



Book Information
ISBN 9780241966037
Author Pat Barker
Format Paperback
Page Count 272
Imprint Penguin Books Ltd
Publisher Penguin Books Ltd
Weight(grams) 191g
Dimensions(mm) 198mm * 129mm * 17mm