Our Noble Selves: A Novel

A thrilling tale of post–World War II London, where the peace proves as tricky to navigate as the past, from the #1 international bestselling author of Life After Life.

When crime correspondent turned war reporter Harry Flynn returns to Britain from Singapore in 1945, he takes a quiet job with the Festival of Britain, a government-funded endeavor aimed at celebrating the nation’s creativity, grit, and ingenuity. He joins a team of misfits and eccentrics as they help to ready the Festival for launch.

When a Frenchwoman goes missing, Flynn becomes the central suspect in her disappearance—and possible murder. He was the last person to see her alive, yet he has no memory of the evening they spent together. As evidence against him mounts, Flynn begins to wonder if he might actually be to blame. To make matters worse, he is surrounded by people who have their own secret agenda.

There may be a carnival atmosphere in London as the country attempts to throw off the drab privations of war, yet beneath the frivolity there is also a worthy attempt to hold up a mirror to both its history and its future. With her unique voice and her skill at conjuring the past, Kate Atkinson turns her light on a nation reconstructing its image and the lengths to which some might go to manipulate the outcome. Witty, brilliantly plotted, and with an unforgettable cast of characters, Our Noble Selves paints a vivid portrait of a former empire struggling with its identity in the aftermath of war.

KATE ATKINSON won the Whitbread (now Costa) Book of the Year prize with her first novel, Behind the Scenes at the Museum. Her 2013 novel set around the Second World War, Life After Life, was shortlisted for the Women’s Prize for Fiction and voted Book of the Year by independent booksellers’ associations on both sides of the Atlantic. It also won the Costa Novel Award, as did her subsequent companion novel, A God in Ruins (2015), and was adapted into a critically acclaimed television series in 2022. Her bestselling novels featuring former detective Jackson Brodie became the BBC television series Case Histories, starring Jason Isaacs. She lives in Edinburgh, Scotland.