Noonday

In Noonday, Pat Barker - the Booker-winning author of the definitive WWI trilogy, Regeneration - turns for the first time to WWII. Paul Tarrant, Elinor Brooke and Kit Neville first met in 1914 at the Slade School of Art, before their generation lost hope, faith and much else besides on the battlefields of Ypres and the Somme. Now it is 1940, they are middle-aged, and another war has begun. London is a haunted city. Some have even turned to seances in an attempt to contact lost loved ones. As the bombs fall and Elinor and the others struggle to survive, old temptations and obsessions return, and all of them are forced to make choices about what they really want ... Praise for Toby's Room: Magnificent; I finished it eagerly, wanting to know what happened next, and as I read, I was enjoying, marvelling and learning. (Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie). Heart-rending, superb, forensically observant and stylistically sublime. (Independent). The plot unfurls to a devastating conclusion ... a very fine piece of work. (Melvyn Bragg, New Statesman). Pat Barker was born in 1943. Her books include the highly acclaimed Regeneration trilogy, comprising Regeneration (1991); which was made into a film of the same name; The Eye in the Door (1993), which won the Guardian Fiction Prize; and The Ghost Road (1995), which won the Booker Prize, as well as the more recent novels Another World, Border Crossing, Double Vision, Life Class and Toby's Room. She lives in Durham.