Noonday, by Pat Barker

The final volume of Barker’s second trilogy (the earlier one, Regeneration, is one of my favorites).  In Life Class and Toby’s Room, we met several young people, most of them art students at the Slade, on the eve of and during World War I.  One dies, another is disfigured, and all bear scars going forward into adulthood.  Having more or less survived the First World War, they are now facing a second cataclysmic war.  In Noonday, these characters are middle-aged, married or divorced, childless or with a child or two.  It is the hot summer of 1940, and England has been at war with Germany for some time, but the Blitz has yet to begin.  The author’s description of those months of bombardment are brilliantly rendered, making the reader experience the fear, the gritty air, the smoke and destruction.  Thrown together as ambulance drivers and wardens, old loves and jealousies reemerge.  Noonday can be read as a stand-alone book, and is the strongest of the three in the trilogy.  Unforgettable.  307 pp