The #1 international bestselling author of Life After Life returns with a thrilling tale of post-World War II London, a city eager to put the dark days of the war behind it, but where the peace proves as tricky to navigate as the past.
When foreign correspondent turned war reporter Harry Flynn returns to Britain in 1949 from Singapore, held for years as a POW, he takes a quiet office job with The Festival of Britain, a nostalgic government-funded endeavor to celebrate British creativity, grit, and ingenuity. There, he joins an oddball team of misfits, ne'er-do-wells, and downright chancers helping to ready the Festival of Britain for launch.
But when one of Flynn's dates, a surly Frenchwoman, goes missing, everything is upended. The last person to see her prior to her disappearance, Flynn is thrust into the center of the investigation. At first, he finds the suspicions preposterous. But it's true he has no memory of the hours following the Frenchwoman's departure, and there's the fact of the nasty black eye he had upon waking. As evidence mounts, Flynn begins to wonder, could he have killed her? And, importantly, are any of his new friends actually foes?
With her unique portraiture of place, Atkinson now turns her light on a nation rebuilding and the lengths some might go to determine its future. Charming, brilliantly plotted, and gripping as ever, Our Noble Selves cements Atkinson's place as one of the greatest chroniclers of our times. KATE ATKINSON is one of the world's foremost novelists whose most recent stand-alone work was the critically acclaimed Shrines of Gaiety, set in the aftermath of the First World War. She won the Whitbread (Costa) Book of the Year Award with her first novel, Behind the Scenes at the Museum. Her three critically lauded and prizewinning novels set around the Second World War are Life After Life, a worldwide bestseller, A God in Ruins (both winners of the Costa Novel Award) and Transcription. Her bestselling literary crime novels featuring former detective Jackson Brodie-Case Histories, One Good Turn, When Will There Be Good News? and Started Early, Took My Dog-became a BBC television series starring Jason Isaacs. Jackson Brodie later returned in the novels Big Sky and Death at the Sign of the Rook. Kate Atkinson was awarded an MBE in 2011 and is a Fellow of The Royal Society of Literature.
