Another World - Softcover

Barker, Pat

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0140258981 ISBN 13: 9780140258981

Publisher: Penguin UK, 1999

Synopsis

In Pat Barker's Another World, the First World War casts its shadow down the generations. At 101 years old, Geordie, a proud Somme veteran, lingers painfully through the days before his death. His grandson Nick is anguished to see this once-resilient man haunted by the ghosts of the trenches and the horror surrounding his brother's death. But in Nick's family home the dark pressures of the past also encroach on the present. As he and his wife Fran try to unite their uneasy family of step- and half-siblings, the discovery of a sinister Victorian drawing reveals the murderous history of their house and casts a violent shadow on their lives . . . 'Gripping in the best, most exquisite sense of the word - as if something wicked were holding you in its clutches' Mail on Sunday 'Brilliant . . . without question the best novel I have read this year . . . once again, World War I extends its dark shadows across Pat Barker's extraordinary writing' Val Hennessy, Daily Mail 'One of the best things she has ever done' Ruth Rendell 'Utterly compelling . . . she is a novelist who probes deep, revealing what people prefer to keep hidden' Allan Massie, Scotsman 'Demonstrates the extraordinary immediacy and vigour of expression we have come to expect from Barker . . . brilliant touches of observation, an unfailing ear for dialogue, a talent for imagery that is darting and brief but unfailingly apt . . . this is a novel that doesn't allow you to miss a sentence' Barry Unsworth, The New York Times Book Review 'Intensely feeling . . . Geordie is a beautifully realised character, tough, humorous, and finally enigmatic' Helen Dunmore, The Times

About this title

Review:

The Regeneration Trilogy (Regeneration, The Eye in the Door, and The Ghost Road) established Pat Barker as one of the most powerful and versatile novelists writing today. Her eighth novel, Another World, is a powerful and complex tale of family, memory, illness, and war. Haunted by memories of the First World War, Geordie is dying of cancer, while his grandson Nick, haunted by the violence of families past (and present), struggles with his thoroughly modern marriage: angry stepchildren, exhausting toddler, miserably pregnant wife. Wracked by guilt, Geordie relives his brother's death in the trenches and his mother's grieving verdict: "It should have been you." Uncovering the intimate and public reach of Geordie's history, Nick is forced up against the "power of old wounds to leak into the present" and the paradoxical fragility--or pliancy--of personal memory. Weaving into her fictional worlds some of the most disturbing images of contemporary Britain--including that of "an older boy taking a toddler by the hand while his companion strides ahead, eager for the atrocity to come"--Barker draws her themes together into a remarkable, sometimes ruthless, study of family life and death. --Vicky Lebeau, Amazon.co.uk

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: 1999
• ISBN 10: 0140258981
• ISBN 13: 9780140258981
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 288