Regeneration

3 primary works • 4 total works Complete

Regeneration

by Pat Barker

Published 7 May 1992

In 1917 Seigfried Sasson, noted poet and decorated war hero, publicly refused to continue serving as a British officer in World War I. His reason: The war was a senseless slaughter. He was officially classified "mentally unsound" and sent to Craiglockhart War Hospital. There a brilliant psychiatrist, Dr. William Rivers, set about restoring Sassoon's "sanity" and sending him back to the trenches. This novel tells what happened as only a novel can. It is a war saga in which not a shot is fired. It is a story of a battle for a man's mind in which only the reader can decide who is the victor, who the vanquished, and who the victim. It is one of the most amazing feats of fiction of our time. "Regeneration" is the first novel in Pat Barker's acclaimed World War I trilogy, which continues with "The Eye in the Door" and culminates in the 1995 Booker Prize-winning "The Ghost Road."

The Eye in the Door

by Pat Barker

Published 1 May 1994

Set in London in 1918, `The Eye in the Door' is an intense and profoundly intelligent examination of the effects of war, continuing the interwoven stories of Dr William Rivers, Billy Prior, and Siegfried Sassoon begun in `Regeneration'.

`The Eye in the Door' was awarded the 1993 Guardian Fiction Prize, while the final volume in the `Regeneration' trilogy, `The Ghost Road', won the Booker Prize in 1995.

Writing in the Sunday Times, Peter Kemp said, `In the climate of exhaustion and hysteria amid which the war is wearing to its close, pressures to fall into line become fierce and take ugly forms. At the forefront of her story, Barker places figures especially menaced by this: pacifists, conscientious objectors and homosexuals ... a sequel every bit as unwaveringly intense and intelligent as its predecessor'.

The Ghost Road

by Pat Barker

Published 1 December 1995

1918, and Billy Prior is in France once again, a real test case for the 'shell-shock' therapies practised at Craiglockhart War Hospital where, with Wilfred Owen, he was a patient. Prior experiences a late-summer idyll, some days of perfect beauty, before the final battles in a war that has destroyed most of his generation. In London, Prior's psychologist, William Rivers, tends to his new patients, more young men whose lives and minds have been shattered and remembers the primitive society on Eddystone Island where he studied as an anthropologist before the war. Gathering together both experiences, he sees the gulf between them narrow! Challenging and harrowing, brilliantly incisive yet always compassionate, Pat Barker's Booker Prize winning novel is magnificent listening.

The Regeneration Trilogy

by Pat Barker

Published 3 October 1996

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

Recommended by Richard Osman

'One of the few real masterpieces of late twentieth-century British fiction' Jonathan Coe

'Original, delicate and unforgettable' Independent

'A new vision of what the First World War did to human beings, male and female, soldiers and civilians. Constantly surprising and formally superb' A. S. Byatt, Daily Telegraph

1917, Scotland. At Craiglockhart War Hospital in Scotland, army psychiatrist William Rivers treats shell-shocked soldiers before sending them back to the front. In his care are poets Siegfried Sassoon and Wilfred Owen, and Billy Prior, who is only able to communicate by means of pencil and paper. . .

Regeneration, The Eye in the Door and The Ghost Road follow the stories of these men until the last months of the war. Widely acclaimed and admired, Pat Barker's Regeneration trilogy paints with moving detail the far-reaching consequences of a conflict which decimated a generation.

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