The Regeneration Trilogy

Pat Barker

Apr 2013 · Penguin UK

About this ebook

The Booker Prize-winning modern classic of contemporary war fiction from the Women's Prize-shortlisted author of The Silence of the Girls

Recommended by Richard Osman

'One of the few real masterpieces of late twentieth-century British fiction' Jonathan Coe

'Original, delicate and unforgettable' Independent

'A new vision of what the First World War did to human beings, male and female, soldiers and civilians. Constantly surprising and formally superb' A. S. Byatt, Daily Telegraph

1917, Scotland. At Craiglockhart War Hospital in Scotland, army psychiatrist William Rivers treats shell-shocked soldiers before sending them back to the front. In his care are poets Siegfried Sassoon and Wilfred Owen, and Billy Prior, who is only able to communicate by means of pencil and paper. . .

Regeneration, The Eye in the Door and The Ghost Road follow the stories of these men until the last months of the war. Widely acclaimed and admired, Pat Barker's Regeneration trilogy paints with moving detail the far-reaching consequences of a conflict which decimated a generation.

The Regeneration trilogy:
Regeneration
The Eye in the Door
The Ghost Road

Ratings and reviews

Both of my Grandfathers fought in WW1. One was captured at Ypres and the other the lone survivior from his company when their trench was shelled. The war destroyed his faith and his health. Pat Barker brought home to me what they went through whilst describing the background 'at home' through her characters, what it meant to people of the upper and lower orders and the observation of Rivers, a compassionate man way ahead of his time, of our society compared with that of 'primitive' people in Melanesia.

The first book is the best, but the author's ability to create landsacape and characters without intruding on the text is phenomenal.

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About the author

Pat Barker was born in Yorkshire and began her literary career in her forties, when she took a short writing course taught by Angela Carter. Encouraged by Carter to continue writing and exploring the lives of working class women, she sent her fiction out to publishers. Thirty-five years later, she has published fifteen novels, including her masterful Regeneration Trilogy, been made a CBE for services to literature, and won awards including the Guardian Fiction Prize and the UK's highest literary honour, the Booker Prize. She lives in Durham and her new novel, The Silence of the Girls, will be published by Hamish Hamilton in August 2018.