Noonday

Book 3: Life Class Trilogy

by Pat Barker

Genres: Historical Fiction; Literary Fiction; War & Military

Synopsis

Penguin presents the unabridged, downloadable, audiobook edition of Noonday by Pat Barker, read by Juliet Stevenson, Stephen Boxer, John Sackville, Anne Reid & Finlay Robertson.

London, the Blitz, autumn 1940. Ambulance drivers Elinor Brooke and Kit Neville ferry injured survivors from bomb sites to hospitals while Elinor's 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, now all three find themselves caught in another war. And as the bombing intensifies, old loves and obsessions re-surface until Elinor is brought face to face with an almost impossible choice.

Completing the story of Elinor, Paul and Kit that began with Life Class and continued with Toby's Room, Noonday is both a stand-alone novel and the climax of a trilogy. Pat Barker brings the besieged and haunted city of London into electrifying life in her most powerful novel since the Regeneration trilogy.

Release date: March 8, 2016

Publisher: Anchor

Print pages: 320

Sample

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.