Book excerpt: A beautiful, powerful and utterly devastating novel from Orange-prize shortlisted author Georgina Harding 'Georgina Harding's novel is the finely tuned work of a writer exceptionally at ease with her craft and a testament to the power and poetry of clean and disciplined prose' Guardian The memory of war will stay with a man longer than anything else. Dawn, mist clearing over rice fields, a burning Vietnamese village, and a young photographer takes 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... He flees to Japan, to lose himself in the vastness of Tokyo, and to take different kinds of pictures: of streets and crowds and cherry blossom – and of a girl with whom he is no longer lost. Yet even here his history will catch up with him: that photograph and his responsibility in taking it; his responsibility as a witness to war, and to other events buried deep in his past. The first in Harding's cycle of acclaimed novels on themes of witness, memory and silence, The Gun Room is beautiful, powerful and utterly devastating.