ShortBookandScribes #BookReview – Our Noble Selves by Kate Atkinson

Posted on 15th September 2026 By Nicola

Our Noble Selves by Kate Atkinson is published by Doubleday and is out now. My thanks to the publishers for the proof package including a stick of rock that I wouldn’t risk my poor teeth on these days but which I used to love when I was a kid (hence the poor teeth).

It’s the summer of 1951 and everyone is looking to put the dark days of the war behind them. The government’s solution: The Festival of Britain, a celebration of the country’s creativity, grit and ingenuity.

For foreign correspondent turned war reporter Harry Flynn, it might offer the chance of redemption after a bad war in the Far East and a peace that is proving no easier to negotiate. Having failed to resume his journalistic career, he reluctantly joins an oddball team of misfits, ne’er-do-wells and downright chancers helping to ready the Festival of Britain for launch.

Flynn’s attempts to resume some semblance of a romantic life also founder when one of his dates goes missing and he is deemed to be the last person to have seen her alive. Could he have been in some way responsible for her disappearance?

Little does he realize that the answer to some of his mounting problems may lie in the hands of a precocious, straight-talking thirteen-year-old called Veronica and a rather scruffy terrier who goes by the name of Mrs Betty…

Our Noble Selves is set around the Festival of Britain in 1951 which was meant to be something for people to look forward to in the post-war years. The main character is Harry Flynn, a man who had a difficult war on the Burma Railway (there isn’t much of this in the book but the little there is is quite horrifying) and has been recruited to be a part of the festival team, in the planning office. This largely involves him sitting in a dingy basement room with his quirky colleagues, sorting out an anthology of dreadful poetry, or getting out and about and running into trouble left, right and centre.

There’s a point at page 60-something when a character says she may die of ennui and quite honestly I was starting to wonder if I felt rather the same. But, I thought, this is Kate Atkinson and I love Kate Atkinson’s work so I persevered and I’m glad I did. The festival detail is plenty, much of which seems amazing and bizarre. In modern day terms it seems astonishing that people would want to see mock up parlours but this was in the post-war austerity era when I suppose folk were just glad to have something to visit and enjoy. It’s when Flynn is accused of murder that it gets really interesting. This is not the sort of book where readers are invited to try and solve the mystery, more one where the reader is invited along to witness Flynn’s hapless attempts to evade the traps that are being set for him.

Whilst the detail is fascinating, it’s really the colourful characterisations, the witty and dry dialogue and the wry observations that stand out and where I think Atkinson excels. I really liked Flynn and the mysterious Maud Ogilvie from his office and I particularly loved Terence, aka ‘the Boy’, who runs errands and is a bit of a Cockney chancer, and Veronica, Flynn’s 13 year old stepdaughter who turns up on his doorstep with Mrs Betty (the dog) and turns out to be just what he needs in his life.

It did take me a bit of getting into Our Noble Selves but I ended up really enjoying it and I laughed out loud a lot. It also gave me an insight into life behind the eclectic scenes of the Festival of Britain, much of which will stay with me.

Kate Atkinson is an international bestselling novelist, as well as playwright and short story writer. She is the author of Life After Life; Transcription; Behind the Scenes at the Museum, a Whitbread Book of the Year winner; the story collection Not the End of the World; and five novels in the Jackson Brodie crime series, which was adapted into the BBC TV show Case Histories.