The Life Class Trilogy

In the Spring of 1914 a group of students at the Slade School of Art have gathered for a life-drawing class. Paul Tarrant is easily distracted by an intriguing fellow student, Elinor Brooke, but when Kit Neville - himself not long out of the Slade but already a well-known painter - makes it clear that he, too, is attracted to Elinor, Paul withdraws into a passionate affair with an artist's model. As spring turns to summer, Paul and Elinor each reach a crisis in their relationships until finally, in the first few days of war, they turn to each other.

Paul's new life as a volunteer for the Belgian Red Cross is a world away from his days at the Slade. The longer he remains in Ypres, the greater the distance between himself and home becomes, and by the time he returns, Paul must confront the fact that life, and love, will never be the same again.

War evokes memories that many would soon rather forget. But when it takes Elinor's brother, Toby, the past becomes an irrepressible force -- and the only one that can unravel the mysteries behind Toby's final days on the battlefield. How exactly did her brother die, and why?

Elinor goes to those around her for help -- but they, too, are fiercely guarding secrets of their own. Her classmate Kit, a witness to Toby's death, holds a vital key to what happened, but he is in no mood to talk. Enlisting the help of her former lover Paul, Elinor determines to uncover the truth -- but at what cost? More importantly, what was the clandestine affair that had taken place between the siblings in 1912, and what will it mean for everyone when Toby's ghosts finally catch up to them?

Moving from the Slade School of Art before the First World War to Queen Mary's Hospital, where surgery and art intersect in the attempt to rebuild the shattered faces of the wounded, Toby's Room is a riveting drama of identity and damage, of intimacy and loss. It is Pat Barker's most powerful novel yet.

London, the Blitz, autumn 1940. Ambulance drivers Elinor Brooke and Kit Neville ferry injured survivors from bombsites 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 resurface 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 to electrifying life in her most powerful novel since the Regeneration trilogy.