The Ghost Road (William Abrahams) - Softcover

Barker, Pat

4.09

17,542 ratings by Goodreads

9780452276727: The Ghost Road (William Abrahams)

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0452276721 ISBN 13: 9780452276727

Publisher: Plume, 1996

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The final book in the Regeneration Trilogy, and winner of the 1995 Booker Prize

The Ghost Road is the culminating masterpiece of Pat Barker's towering World War I fiction trilogy. The time of the novel is the closing months of the most senselessly savage of modern conflicts. 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.

Combining poetic intensity with gritty realism, blending biting humor with tragic drama, moving toward a denouement as inevitable as it is devastating, The Ghost Road both encapsulates history and transcends it. It is a modern masterpiece

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About the Author:

PAT BARKER has earned a place in the first rank of contemporary British writers with such novels as Union Street, Regeneration (shortlisted for Britain's prestigious Booker Prize and chosen by the New York Times as one of the four best novels of 1992), The Eye in the Door (winner of the 1993 Guardian fiction prize), and The Ghost Road (winner of the 1995 Booker Prize). The latter three novels are available in Dutton hardcover and Plume paperback editions. Pat Barker lives in Durham, England.

From AudioFile:

When Billy Prior returns to France for the fourth time in September of 1918, it's like coming home. He does so against everyone's advice, but when he watches the sun rise slowly after the Battle of Joncourt, he realizes why he couldn't have stayed back. And mysteriously, so do we. Peter Firth's reading captures perfectly Barker's tragic mix of pity and apotheosis. An accomplished British actor, Firth is at once the cynical, but savvy, Prior, the stammering Professor Dodgson (Lewis Carroll), soft-spoken Dr. Rivers, all with transparent ease. His unerring sense of character and tone recreates the bitter irony of that last push in 1918 when so many died so needlessly. For Barker, these last dead, though they sour the trumpet of victory, are war's only winners. At the end Firth's silence becomes eloquent. P.E.F. An AUDIOFILE Earphones Award winner. (c)AudioFile, Portland, Maine

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