Pat Barker was born in Yorkshire and began her literary career in her late thirties, 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.

Pat Barker

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London, the Blitz, autumn 1940. Ambulance drivers Elinor Brooke and Kit Neville ferry injured survivors from bombsites to hospitals while Elinor's husband Paul works as an air-raid warden. Once fellow students at the Slade School of Fine Art, before the First World War destroyed the hopes of their generation, now all three find themselves caught in another war. And as the bombing intensifies, old loves and obsessions resurface until Elinor is brought face to face with an almost impossible choice. 
 
Completing the story of Elinor, Paul and Kit that began with Life Class and continued with Toby's Room, Noonday is both a stand-alone novel and the climax of a trilogy. Pat Barker brings the besieged and haunted city of London to electrifying life in her most powerful novel since the Regeneration trilogy.

Noonday

Pat Barker's award-winning Regeneration Trilogy - comprising Regeneration, The Eye in the Door and The Ghost Road - is the heart-rending story of the last two years of the First World War seen through the eyes of army psychologist William Rivers and damaged soldier Billy Prior. 
 
As Rivers struggles with the responsibility of helping the men in his charge - including the traumatized poet Siegfried Sassoon - only to see them returned to the front, we see how an entire generation of young men was brutalized by the horrors of the trenches.

The Regeneration Trilogy

War evokes memories that many would soon rather forget. But when it takes Elinor's brother, Toby, the past becomes an irrepressible force -- and the only one that can unravel the mysteries behind Toby's final days on the battlefield. How exactly did her brother die, and why? 
 
Elinor goes to those around her for help -- but they, too, are fiercely guarding secrets of their own. Her classmate Kit, a witness to Toby's death, holds a vital key to what happened, but he is in no mood to talk. Enlisting the help of her former lover Paul, Elinor determines to uncover the truth -- but at what cost? More importantly, what was the clandestine affair that had taken place between the siblings in 1912, and what will it mean for everyone when Toby's ghosts finally catch up to them? 
 
Moving from the Slade School of Art before the First World War to Queen Mary's Hospital, where surgery and art intersect in the attempt to rebuild the shattered faces of the wounded, Toby's Room is a riveting drama of identity and damage, of intimacy and loss. It is Pat Barker's most powerful novel yet.

Toby's Room

Craiglockhart War Hospital, Scotland, 1917, where 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 ... 
 
Regeneration is the classic exploration of how the traumas of war brutalised a generation of young men. 
 
The first book in the Regeneration trilogy

Regeneration

Troy has fallen and the Greek victors are primed to return home, loaded with spoils. All they need is a good wind to lift their sails. 
 
But the wind does not come. The gods are offended - the body of Priam lies desecrated, unburied - and so the victors remain in uneasy limbo, camped in the shadow of the city they destroyed. The coalition that held them together begins to fray, as old feuds resurface and new suspicions fester. 
 
Largely unnoticed by her squabbling captors, erstwhile queen Briseis remains in the Greek encampment. She forges alliances where she can - with young, rebellious Amina, with defiant, aged Hecuba, with Calchus, the disgraced priest - and she begins to see the path to revenge...

The Women of Troy

Queen Briseis has been stolen from her conquered homeland and given as a concubine to a foreign warrior. The warrior is Achilles: famed hero, loathed enemy, ruthless butcher, darkly troubled spirit. Briseis's fate is now indivisibly entwined with his. 
 
No one knows it yet, but there are just ten weeks to go until the Fall of Troy, the end of this long and bitter war. This is the start of The Iliad: the most famous war story ever told. The next ten weeks will be a story of male power, male ego, male violence. But what of the women? The thousands of female slaves in the soldiers' camp - in the laundry, at the loom, laying out the dead? Briseis is one of their number - and she will be our witness to history.

The Silence of the Girls

After ten blood-filled years, the war is over. Troy lies in smoking ruins as the victorious Greeks fill their ships with the spoils of battle. 
 
Alongside the treasures looted are the many Trojan women captured by the Greeks – among them the legendary prophetess Cassandra, and her watchful maid, Ritsa. Enslaved as concubine – war-wife – to King Agamemnon, Cassandra is plagued by visions of his death – and her own – while Ritsa is forced to bear witness to both Cassandra’s frenzies and the horrors to come. 
 
Meanwhile, awaiting the fleet’s return is Queen Clytemnestra, vengeful wife of Agamemnon. Heart-shattered by her husband’s choice to sacrifice their eldest daughter to the gods in exchange for a fair wind to Troy, she has spent this long decade plotting retribution, in a palace haunted by child-ghosts. 
 
As one wife journeys toward the other, united by the vision of Agamemnon’s death, one thing is certain: this long-awaited homecoming will change everyone’s fates forever.

The Voyage Home

London, 1918. Billy Prior is working for Intelligence in the Ministry of Munitions. But his private encounters with women and men &ndash; pacifists, objectors, homosexuals &ndash; conflict with his duties as a soldier, and it is not long before his sense of himself fragments and breaks down. Forced to consult the man who helped him before &ndash; army psychiatrist William Rivers &ndash; Prior must confront his inability to be the dutiful soldier his superiors wish him to be &hellip; 
 
The Eye in the Door is a heart-rending study of the contradictions of war and of those forced to live through it. 
 
The second book in the Regeneration trilogy

The Eye in the Door

1918, the closing months of the war. Army psychiatrist William Rivers is increasingly concerned for the men who have been in his care &ndash; particularly Billy Prior, who is about to return to combat in France with young poet Wilfred Owen. As Rivers tries to make sense of what, if anything, he has done to help these injured men, Prior and Owen await the final battles in a war that has decimated a generation &hellip; 
 
The Ghost Road is the Booker Prize winning account of the devastating final months of the First World War. 
 
The third book in the Regeneration trilogy

The Ghost Road

In the Spring of 1914 a group of students at the Slade School of Art have gathered for a life-drawing class. Paul Tarrant is easily distracted by an intriguing fellow student, Elinor Brooke, but when Kit Neville - himself not long out of the Slade but already a well-known painter - makes it clear that he, too, is attracted to Elinor, Paul withdraws into a passionate affair with an artist's model. As spring turns to summer, Paul and Elinor each reach a crisis in their relationships until finally, in the first few days of war, they turn to each other. 
 
Paul's new life as a volunteer for the Belgian Red Cross is a world away from his days at the Slade. The longer he remains in Ypres, the greater the distance between himself and home becomes, and by the time he returns, Paul must confront the fact that life, and love, will never be the same again.

Life Class

Insomnia, exhaustion, recurring nightmares - Stephen Sharkey is suffering the aftereffects of his career as a war reporter, most recently in Afghanistan, where Ben Frobisher, war photographer and friend, has been shot dead on assignment. Hanging up his flak jacket and turning his back on the everyday reality of war, Stephen moves into a quiet and peaceful cottage in the north of England. It seems the perfect environment in which to write his book on the representations of war - one that will be based largely on Ben Frobisher's work. But Stephen's supposed isolation offers no protection from other people's suffering or the shattering effects of human brutality . . .

Double Vision

Nick's grandfather Geordie lies dying. As Nick watches, Geordie starts to relive the horrors surrounding his brother's death and his own terrible experiences during the First World War. Meanwhile, Nick and his wife Fran are trying to unite their increasingly fractious young family, despite the discovery of an obscene Victorian drawing which reveals the tragic history of their house and casts a terrifying shadow over the family.

Another World

When Tom Seymour, a child psychologist, plunges into a river to save a young man from drowning, he unwittingly reopens a chapter from his past he'd hoped to forget. For Tom already knows Danny Miller - when Danny was ten Tom helped imprison him for the killing of an old woman. Now out of prison with a new identity, Danny has some questions - questions he thinks only Tom can answer. Reluctantly, Tom is drawn back into Danny's world - a place where the border between good and evil, innocence and guilt is blurred and confused. But when Danny's demands on Tom become extreme, Tom wonders whether he has crossed a line of his own - and in crossing it, can he ever go back?

Border Crossing

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