Noonday by Pat Barker, book review: An unvarnished view of the Blitz

Pat Barker has very much made the masculine experience of war her subject. Under war's implacable demands, through its turmoil and horror, her heroes reveal their mettle. Her award-winning Regeneration trilogy examined the impact of battle on men in the trenches in the 1914-1918 conflict, their shattered nervous systems no less than their bodies, and the work of the psychiatrists patching them up and sending them back to the Front.