The Ghost Road

Description

Set in the closing months of World War I, this towering novel combines poetic intenstiy 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.   Winner of the 1995 Booker Prize

Awards

Winner of Bookseller's Association Author of the Year Award 1996 and Booker Prize for Fiction 1995. Shortlisted for Best of the Booker 2008.

Author description

Pat Barker was born in 1943 and educated at LSE. She has published several novels including her highly acclaimed Regeneration Trilogy. The Eye in the Door was winner of the 1993 Guardian Fiction Prize, and The Ghost Road, winner of the 1995 Booker Prize for Fiction. Pat Barker is married and lives in Durham.