Noonday (The Life Class Trilogy) - Softcover

Barker, Pat

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0241966035 ISBN 13: 9780241966037

Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd, 2016

Synopsis

In Noonday, Pat Barker - the Man Booker-winning author of the definitive WWI trilogy, Regeneration - turns for the first time to WWII.

'Afterwards, it was the horses she remembered, galloping towards them out of the orange-streaked darkness, their manes and tails on fire...'

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.

Once fellow students at the Slade School of Fine Art, before the First World War destroyed the hopes of their generation, they now find themselves caught in another war, this time at home. 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.

Completing the story of Elinor Brooke, Paul Tarrant and Kit Neville, begun with Life Class and continued with Toby's Room, Noonday is both a stand-alone novel and the climax of a trilogy. Writing about the Second World War for the first time, Pat Barker brings the besieged and haunted city of London into electrifying life in her most powerful novel since the Regeneration trilogy.

'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

'Barker's command of detail and gift for metaphor are as sharp as ever... As a tribute to those who dared and suffered on the home front, Noonday is in the first rank.' Antony Garner, Mail on Sunday

'Narrative jumps colourfully alive, fizzes with energy.' Michele Roberts, Independent

'Tremendously good.' Daily Mail

'Pat Barker's Noonday marked the end of another war trilogy which shows no end to her talent in describing how conflicts rupture the soul.' Arifa Akbar, Independent
Praise for Pat Barker:

'She is not only a fine chronicler of war but of human nature.' Independent

'A brilliant stylist... Barker delves unflinchingly into the enduring mysteries of human motivation.' Sunday Telegraph

'You go to her for plain truths, a driving storyline and a clear eye, steadily facing the history of our world.' The Guardian

Other titles in the trilogy:
Life Class
Toby's Room

About this title

About the Author

Pat Barker was born in 1943. She is the author of Union Street, Blow your
House Down, The Century's Daughter, The Man Who Wasn't There, the
Regeneration Trilogy (Regeneration, The Eye in the Door and The Ghost Road),
Another World, Border Crossing, Double Vision, and the Life Class Trilogy (Life
Class, Toby's Room and Noonday). Pat Barker lives in Durham.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

CHAPTER ONE:

Elinor was halfway up the drive when she sensed she was being watched. She stopped and scanned the upstairs windows—wide open in the heat as if the house were gasping  for breath—but there was nobody looking down. Then, from the sycamore tree at the end of the gar- den, came a rustling  of leaves. Oh, of course: Kenny. She was tempted to ignore him, but that seemed unkind, so she went across the lawn and peered up into the branches.
 “Kenny?”

No reply. There was often no reply.

Kenny had arrived almost a year ago now, among the first batch of evacuees, and, although this area had since been reclassified—“neutral” rather than “safe”—here he remained. She felt his gaze heavy on the top of her head, like a hand, as she stood squinting up into the late-afternoon sunlight.

Kenny spent  hours up there, not reading his comics, not building a tree house, not dropping conkers on people’s heads—no, just watching. He had a red notebook in which he wrote down car numbers, the time people arrived, the time they left . . . Of course, you forgot what it was like to be his age: probably every visitor was a German spy. Oh, and he ate himself, that was the other thing. He was forever nibbling his fingernails, tearing at his cuticles, picking scabs off his knees and licking up the blood. Even pulling hair out of his head and sucking it. And, despite being a year at the village school, he hadn’t made friends. But then, he was the sort of child who attracts bullying, she thought, guiltily conscious of her own failure to like him.
 “Kenny? Isn’t it time for tea?”

Then, with a great crash of leaves  and branches, he dropped at her feet and stood looking up at her, scowling, for all the world like a small, sour, angry crab apple.

“Where’s Paul?”

“I’m afraid he couldn’t come, he’s busy.”

“He’s always busy.”

“Well, yes, he’s got a lot to do. Are you coming in now?” Evidently that didn’t deserve a reply.

He turned his back on her and ran off through the arch into the kitchen garden.

Edition details

• Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd
• Publication date: 2016
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0241966035
• ISBN 13: 9780241966037
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 259