The Ghost Road: Booker Prize Winner (A Novel) (Regeneration Trilogy) - Softcover

Barker, Pat

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0142180602 ISBN 13: 9780142180600

Publisher: Plume, 2013

Synopsis

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

About this title

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), The Ghost Road (winner of the 1995 Booker Prize), and Noonday. 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

About this edition

• Publisher: Plume
• Publication date: 2013
• ISBN 10: 0142180602
• ISBN 13: 9780142180600
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 277