Regeneration

By: Pat Barker

Narrated by: Simon Russell Beale

"The trilogy is trying to tell something about the parts of war that don't get into the official accounts" –Pat Barker

The first book of the Regeneration Trilogy and a Booker Prize nominee

In 1917 Siegfried 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.

One of the most amazing feats of fiction of our time, Regneration has been hailed by critics across the globe. As August 2014 marks the 100-year anniversary of World War I, this book is as timely and relevant as ever.

Critic reviews

Praise for Regeneration

“Dramatic, moving, brilliantly harrowing...a novel that makes the madness of war more than a metaphor.”—The New York Times

“Earns...a place on the shelf of WWI literature.”—Kirkus Reviews

“Extremely accomplished and intelligent... Barker is adept at dramatizing moral dilemmas that have no easy answers.”—Entertainment Weekly

“One of the most deserving winners of the prestigious Booker fiction prize in recent years.”—The New York Review of Books

“Pat Barker makes both her fictional and her real characters complex and credible....Best of all, she attends to the moral nuances of a time when it was hard to distinguish the lesser insanities from the greater ones.”—Los Angeles Times Book Review

“It has been Pat Barker’s accomplishment to enlarge the scope of the contemporary English novel....Regeneration is an inspiring book that balances conscience and thevitality of change against a collapsing world.”—The New Yorker