Regeneration

Regeneration

The first novel in Pat Barker's Booker Prize-winning Regeneration trilogy

Summary

The devastating modern classic of contemporary war fiction from Women's Prize-shortlisted author of The Silence of the Girls

Regeneration is the first novel in Pat Barker's Booker Prize-winning Regeneration trilogy - a powerfully moving portrait of the deep legacy of human trauma in the First World War

'Brilliant, intense and subtle' Peter Kemp, Sunday Times

'One of the strongest and most interesting novelists of her generation' Guardian

'Unforgettable' Sunday Telegraph


Craiglockhart War Hospital, Scotland, 1917, and army psychiatrist William Rivers is treating shell-shocked soldiers. Under his care are the poets Siegfried Sassoon and Wilfred Owen, as well as mute Billy Prior, who is only able to communicate by means of pencil and paper. Rivers's job is to make the men in his charge healthy enough to fight. Yet the closer he gets to mending his patients' minds the harder becomes every decision to send them back to the horrors of the front. Pat Barker's Regeneration is the classic exploration of how the traumas of war brutalised a generation of young men.

The Regeneration trilogy:
Regeneration
The Eye in the Door
The Ghost Road

About the author

Pat Barker

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. She has published sixteen novels, including her masterful Regeneration Trilogy which includes the Booker Prize-winning The Ghost Road. The Silence of the Girls was shortlisted for the Women's Prize for Fiction and won an Independent Bookshop Award 2019. The Women of Troy was a number one Sunday Times bestseller. The Voyage Home continues the series.
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