Doubleday, 10 September 2026
Available as: HB, 352pp audio, e
Source: Advance e-copy
ISBN(HB): 9781529937824
I have recently been listening to Kate Atkinson's earlier novel, Transcription, which has been dramatised for Radio 4. It's a story of wartime espionage and peacetime consequences, set between 1941 and 1951 and I was struck by athematic unity (at least in part) with Our Noble Selves.
The later book is set wholly during 1951 and is focussed on the Festival of Britain, which took place in that year, but it looks back to the war in two respects.
First, the main character, ex-journalist Harry Flynn, has landed up in his rather non-job as part of the team preparing the Festival after spending most of the War as a prisoner of the Japanese, working on the infamous Burma Railway. ('"Was it absolute hell?' Flynn shrugged. 'Others had it as bad.' He was thinking of Evans. Of almost every returning soldier since Troy and Thermopylae.' In the manner of his day and age, Flynn doesn't want to recall the horrors that he underwent, although they occasionally creep through in his dreams (he depends on drink to limit this) in something of the same manner as the flashbacks in Transcription. In her Afterword, Atkinson says that she originally intended to make more of these events but cut them back because she wanted to make the story lighter. It is true that it's lighter than Transcription, but I also feel that this choice fits better with the reality that such awful events were often ignored for decades.
It also fits with the whole ethos of the Festival - designed partly as an enormous party for a war-weary country, partly as a bold vision of the future, showcasing British living, manufactures, the Empire (as it still was) and modern design. Atkinson gives us extracts from Festival guides and maps, conveying the epic scale of the event and some of its subjects. The book is peppered with extracts from the catalogue of goods available, with supplier names and details. It's a fascinating glimpse into what now seems like a vanished culture.
The second overlap with Transcription is that while the action is set in the present (ie 1951) events are very much driven by unfinished business from the war. This is a time when everyone still wants to move on, to forget about it. (Though as Flynn shrewdly comments, 'A few years later and they start wanting to remember again. A few decades later and they're wallowing in it.') Yet, there are reputations to be protected, grudges to be satisfied, enmities and differences that still fester. Such things have a way of shaping events, as we will see.
An amusing feature of Harry Flynn is that he's apparently very attractive to women. While he doesn't really seem to understand that, he's willing to go along with it and, at the start of the book, he's found himself a wife - hoping to settle in a boring suburban home with his little family and their dog. The nightmares put paid to that, and one day, Flynn just walks out of an increasingly fractious relationship, eventually landing his job at the Festival. But the ladies still have an eye for him, and so when a woman working at the office disappears after meeting him, she's assumed to be 'Your French girlfriend', a misconception that he struggles against through most of the story.
Worse, Flynn comes under suspicion, the plot building up with coincidences, trickery and ever more-desperate attempts by Harry to clear his name by working out what really happened - in the teeth of the police, who see him as a wrong 'un, and a cast of washed-up war heroes (and some villains) of the sort who gradually pickled themselves in whisky in London bars though the late 40s and 50s. There are some truly dreadful people here, with dreadful secrets to persevere, who don't welcome Flynn's probing into their affairs. It makes for an effective thriller plot, leavened with humour and Atkinson's absolutely, steel-sharp observations of manners and gift for drawing character.
We also actually get quite a shrewd perspective on the Festival itself. Largely inaccessible to us now except through old guides and newspaper photographs, it is often portrayed in idealogical terms as a brave future vision - and of course there is that element. However Atkinson does gently show how much of what was on display was backward, not forward looking: the model rooms on show for example informed by class and gender prejudices which seem distinctly antediluvian to us now.
In all, Our Noble Selves (the title comes from a military toast and does rather capture the slightly self-satisfied tone which Atkinson imputes, whether fairly or not, to the Festival itself and the wider Britain of 1951) is a fun read, jostling with life and with characters who are a joy to spend time among. I'd strongly recommend it.
For more information about Our Noble Selves, see the publisher's website here.