The Ghost Road: Booker Prize Winner (A Novel)

Pat Barker

12/2013 · Regeneration Trilogy 3. kniha · Predajca: Penguin

Táto e‑kniha

Winner of the 1995 Booker Prize

Set in the closing months of World War I, this towering novel combines poetic intensity with gritty realism as it brings Pat Barker’s Regeneration trilogy to its stunning conclusion.

In France, millions of men engaged in brutal trench warfare are all “ghosts in the making.” In England, psychologist William Rivers, with severe pangs of conscience, treats the mental casualties of the war to make them whole enough to fight again. One of these, Billy Prior, risen to the officer class from the working class, both courageous and sardonic, decides to return to France with his fellow officer, poet Wilfred Owen, to fight a war he no longer believes in. Meanwhile, Rivers, enfevered by influenza returns in memory to his experience studying a South Pacific tribe whose ethos amounted to a culture of death. Across the gulf between his society and theirs, Rivers begins to form connections that cast new light on his—and our—understanding of war.

O autorovi

Pat Barker is the author of sixteen novels, beginning with her working-class masterpiece Union Street in 1982. Her Regeneration Trilogy novels, set in the First World War, were awarded the Booker Prize and praised as some of the greatest historical novels in British literature. Her latest novels are The Silence of the Girls, which was shortlisted for the Women's Prize for Fiction and the Gordon Burn Prize in the UK and won the Independent Bookshop Award in 2019, and The Women of Troy. She was made a CBE (Commander of the Order of the British Empire) in 2000. She lives in Durham, England.