The Gun Room

by Harding, Georgina

• ISBN13: 9781632864369
• ISBN10: 1632864363
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2016-11-15
• Publisher: Bloomsbury USA

Summary

Dawn, mist clearing over the rice fields, a burning Vietnamese village, and a young war photographer gets 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, and he flees.

He drifts on to Japan, to lose himself in the vastness of Tokyo, where there are different kinds of photographs to be taken--pictures of crowds and subways and cherry blossoms. And innumerable pictures of Kumiko, the girl with whom he is no longer lost. But even here, in this alien city, his history catches up with him: the photograph and his responsibility in taking it, his responsibility as a witness to war, and as a witness to other events buried far deeper in his past.

The Gun Room is a powerful exploration of image and memory, and of the moral and emotional complexities of the experience of war.

Author Biography

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--and two works of non-fiction, In Another Europe and Tranquebar: A Season in South India. She lives in London and on a farm in Essex.