Brooke Family Books in Order

The Brooke Family novels trace the tangled lives of a group of artists and siblings before, during, and after the two world wars. Centered on painter Elinor Brooke and the people closest to her, the trilogy follows a generation that comes of age in the art schools of Edwardian London and is changed for ever by the conflicts that follow.

In Life Class it is the spring of 1914 and Elinor is studying at the Slade School of Art. Fellow student Paul Tarrant struggles to find his footing both as an artist and as a man who has left behind a difficult northern childhood, while the confident Kit Neville already enjoys a rising reputation. Their rivalries and affairs play out in studios, cafes, and rented rooms as the threat of war moves closer. When the fighting begins, Paul volunteers at a casualty clearing hospital near the front, and his letters back to Elinor and Kit show him trying to reconcile what he sees in the wards with the world of painting he has left behind.

Toby's Room shifts the focus back to Elinor's family. Her brother Toby, a medical officer in the army, is reported missing and presumed dead, but a few scraps of evidence make Elinor suspect there is more to the story. She turns back to Paul and Kit, now both veterans carrying their own scars, to help her uncover the truth. The search draws them into Queen Mary's Hospital at Sidcup, where surgeons and artists collaborate to rebuild shattered faces. Elinor works there as a medical illustrator, forced to look closely at wounds that echo the emotional damage she and her friends carry.

By Noonday it is 1940 and the setting has shifted to London during the Blitz. Elinor and Kit drive ambulances through bombed streets, while Paul serves as an air raid warden. The three of them, once restless students in life drawing classes, now spend their nights picking through rubble and hauling the living and the dead out of ruined buildings. Old patterns of desire and resentment resurface under the pressure of constant danger, and the arrival of a spirit medium with a taste for spectacle complicates Elinor's grief for those she has already lost.

Taken together, the Brooke books explore how war shapes not only soldiers but also the people who live with its aftermath. Barker is as interested in studio arguments and awkward family meals as she is in front line scenes, and she returns again and again to the question of what art can or should show. Through Elinor, Paul, Kit, and the absent presence of Toby, the trilogy builds a picture of a family and a circle of friends trying to draw, paint, and love their way through some of the most violent decades of the last century.