A vivid, thrilling novel of adventure, intrigue and desire, from the acclaimed author of The English Patient,
In a story as shadowed and luminous as memory itself, Warlight sets the careless freedom of adolescence against the turmoil of post-war England. It is 1945, and London is recovering from the years of war. Fourteen-year-old Nathaniel and his sister, Rachel, unexpectedly abandoned by their parents, are left in the care of an enigmatic figure named The Moth. They suspect he might be a criminal, and grow both more convinced and less concerned as they get to know his eccentric crew of friends: men and women with a shared history, who seem determined to protect, and educate (in rather unusual ways), Nathaniel and Rachel. But are they really what and who they claim to be?
Caught up in the escapades of youth and first love, Nathaniel ignores the uncertain signs of danger. A dozen years later, he sets out to piece together - as much through recollection and imagining as through the truths he uncovers - all he didn't know or understand in that time: a journey that will draw him in to a morally ambivalent, secret world.