Paul Tarrant is doomed to a life of working in the ironworks but comes to London on his grandmother's legacy to pursue his real dream: painting. Kit Neville is the son of a successful war correspondent and already becoming famous for his aggressive, noisy modern canvases. He's desperately in love with Elinor Brooke, from the landed world of privilege, who has won a scholarship to the Slade, the legendary art school in London where they all meet. There Paul falls in love with Teresa, an art school model with a violent stalker of a husband. And Elinor begins to fall in love with Paul. They all remain true to their own talent in their own way as they're pulled apart and flung together by the war that engulfs them all.
Intermingled with the fictional characters are the real-life womanizing painter Augustus John, the eccentric Lady Ottoline Morrell, the greatest aristocratic hostess of her time, and Dr. Henry Tonks, the Victorian surgeon who became an artist and helped pioneer techniques of plastic surgery on the disfigured young soldiers returning from the horrors of the trenches.
In her usual clear, clean, effortless prose, Pat Barker tells a compelling story that never lets up momentum, avoids sentimentality and predictability and concludes in an extremely satisfying manner while asking powerful questions about the role of war in art, unanswered questions with plenty of ammo for all sides. She creates characters with passions and values you believe in, talented young people you care about in a world where art and war and love converge.-–Nick DiMartino