The Eye in the Door - Softcover

Barker, Pat

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0141030941 ISBN 13: 9780141030944

Publisher: Penguin UK, 2008

Synopsis

The Eye in the Door is the second novel in Pat Barker's classic Regeneration trilogy. WINNER OF THE 1993 GUARDIAN FICTION PRIZE. London, 1918. Billy Prior is working for Intelligence in the Ministry of Munitions. But his private encounters with women and men - pacifists, objectors, homosexuals - conflict with his duties as a soldier, and it is not long before his sense of himself fragments and breaks down. Forced to consult the man who helped him before - army psychiatrist William Rivers - Prior must confront his inability to be the dutiful soldier his superiors wish him to be ... The Eye in the Door is a heart-rending study of the contradictions of war and of those forced to live through it. 'A new vision of what the First World War did to human beings, male and female, soldiers and civilians' A. S. Byatt, Daily Telegraph 'Every bit as waveringly intense and intelligent as its predecessor' Sunday Times 'Startlingly original . . . spellbinding' Sunday Telegraph 'Gripping, moving, profoundly intelligent . . . bursting with energy and darkly funny' Independent on Sunday Other titles in the trilogy: Regeneration The Ghost Road

About this title

Review:

The Eye in the Door is the second installation of Pat Barker's acclaimed and haunting historical fiction trilogy about British soldiers traumatized by World War I trench warfare and the methods used by psychiatrist William Rivers to treat them. As with the other two, the book was recognized with awards, winning the 1993 Guardian Fiction Prize. Here, Lieutenant Billy Prior is tormented by figuring out which side of several coins does he live -- coward or hero, crazy or sane, homosexual or heterosexual, upper class or lower. He represents the upheaval in Britain during the war and the severe trauma felt by its soldiers. The writing is sparse yet multilayered; Barker uses the lives of a few to capture an entire society during a tumultuous period.

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.

About this edition

• Publisher: Penguin UK
• Publication date: 2008
• ISBN 10: 0141030941
• ISBN 13: 9780141030944
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 288