Noonday

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 *

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. Encouraged by Carter to continue writing, she sent her fiction out. Thirty-five years later, she has published sixteen novels, including her masterful Regeneration Trilogy, been made a CBE for services to literature, and won the UK's highest literary honour, the Booker Prize. Her last novel, The Silence of the Girls, began the story of Briseis, the forgotten woman at the heart of one of the most famous war epics ever told. It was shortlisted for the Women's Prize for Fiction, the Costa Novel Award and the Gordon Burn Prize, and won an Independent Bookshop Award 2019. The Women of Troy continues that story. Pat Barker lives in Durham.