Gun Room

A beautiful, powerful and utterly devastating novel from Orange-prize shortlisted author Georgina Harding'Georgina Harding’s novel is the finely tuned work of a writer exceptionally at ease with her craft and a testament to the power and poetry of clean and disciplined prose' GuardianThe memory of war will stay with a man longer than anything else. Dawn, mist clearing over rice fields, a burning Vietnamese village, and a young photographer takes the shot that might make his career. The image, of a staring soldier in the midst of mayhem, will become one of the great photographs of the war. But what Jonathan has seen in that village is more than he can bear... He flees to Japan, to lose himself in the vastness of Tokyo, and to take different kinds of pictures: of streets and crowds and cherry blossom – and of a girl with whom he is no longer lost. Yet even here his history will catch up with him: that photograph and his responsibility in taking it; his responsibility as a witness to war, and to other events buried deep in his past.The first in Harding’s cycle of acclaimed novels on themes of witness, memory and silence, The Gun Room is beautiful, powerful and utterly devastating.

Georgina Harding’s novel is the finely tuned work of a writer exceptionally at ease with her craft and a testament to the power and poetry of clean and disciplined prose, Quietly and restrainedly, The Gun Room is a book that provokes searching questions, Graceful and considered ... The dreamlike quality is heightened by Harding’s sharply observed prose ... As befits a writer adept at carefully cropped scenes, Harding has the measure of photography. The novel plays with its ability to captivate, shock, inform and misdirect, In delicate, hypnotic prose, Harding describes the devastating effects of war and the trauma of bearing witness, A moving story

Georgina Harding is the author of three novels: The Solitude of Thomas Cave, The Spy Game, which was a BBC Book at Bedtime and shortlisted for an Encore Award, and, most recently, Painter of Silence, which was shortlisted for the Orange Prize for Fiction 2012. She lives on a farm in the Stour Valley, Essex.