Three Hours

Snow is falling on rural Somerset and a school is under attack. Rosamund Lupton gives the book the length of the event itself: three hours, moving between everyone inside it and everyone outside.

The headmaster has been shot and is in the library, conscious, unable to get to any of the people he is responsible for. A group of students is barricaded in the theatre. Hannah is sixteen and in love for the first time and now this.

Rafi, a teenage refugee from Syria who has already survived one version of this, is trying to get to his younger brother. Outside, parents are gathering in the snow for news, and a police psychologist is working the question of who is doing this and why.

The result is less a thriller about a siege than a group portrait taken under pressure, and Lupton is more interested in what people do for each other in those hours than in the men with the guns.