Synopsis
Pat Barker returns to the First World War in Toby's Room, a dark, compelling novel of human desire, wartime horror and the power of friendship.
When Toby is reported 'Missing, Believed Killed', another secret casts a lengthening shadow over Elinor's world: how exactly did Toby die - and why? Elinor determines to uncover the truth. Only then can she finally close the door to Toby's room. Moving from the Slade School of Art to Queen Mary's Hospital, where surgery and art intersect in the rebuilding of the shattered faces of the wounded, Toby's Room is a riveting drama of identity, damage, intimacy and loss. Toby's Room is Pat Barker's most powerful novel yet.
Pat Barker was born in 1943. Her books include the highly acclaimed Regeneration trilogy, comprising Regeneration, which has been filmed, The Eye in the Door, which won the Guardian Fiction Prize, and The Ghost Road, which won the Booker Prize. The trilogy featured the Observer's 2012 list of the ten best historical novels. She is also the author of the more recent novels Another World, Border Crossing, Double Vision, Life Class, and Toby's Room. She lives in Durham.
Reviews
Customer Review: 10 April 2013
Reviewer: D Evans
'A powerful read. What really impressed me was the way Barker deals with thorny and even sensational subjects (sexual transgression, gory injury and violent death) in such a humane way that it never seems at all sensational. In fact, it totally rings true emotionally and the characters'' experiences are surprisingly easy to identify with, mainly because the way Barker describes loss will be devastatingly familiar to most readers, whatever the circumstances. The final scene in Toby''s room was particularly affecting in this respect, with its aching sense of the absence of a dead loved one. I was also fascinated not just by the description of the bodies that are variously dissected, dismembered in battle and operated on in hospitals, but also the way these mutilated bodies are so thematically central to the book. All the characters are scarred in some way or another and the backdrop of the war just seems to accentuate the way in which characters seem to find it difficult to reconcile their bodily frailty and impulses with their emotional existence in society - mainly because the society portrayed here seems, both on the battlefield and off it, totally ill-equipped to deal with the extreme ends of physical experiences and urges. At one point, a bird is described as a collection of muscle and sinew swooping about in the sky and yet the human characters don''t really seem to be any different. For all their intelligence, humanity comes across nihilistically here as just an aimless collection of flesh and chemicals.'
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Format :
Paperback
ISBN: 9780141042206
Size : 129 x 198mm
Pages : 272
Published : 06 Feb 2013
Publisher : Penguin
Other formats for Toby's Room:
» Hardback : £16.99
» ePub eBook: eBook : £4.00
Toby's Room
£7.99
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