Showing results by author "Pat Barker"

The ancient city of Troy has withstood a decade under siege of the powerful Greek army, who continue to wage bloody war over a stolen woman - Helen. In the Greek camp, another woman watches and waits for the war's outcome: Briseis. She was queen of one of Troy's neighboring kingdoms until Achilles, Greece's greatest warrior, sacked her city and murdered her husband and brothers. Briseis becomes Achilles' concubine, a prize of battle, and must adjust quickly in order to survive a radically different life, as one of the many conquered women who serve the Greek army. 

In Craiglockhart war hospital, Dr William Rivers attempts to restore the sanity of officers from World War I. When Siegfried Sassoon publishes his declaration of protest against the war, the authorities decide to have him declared mentally defective and send him to Craiglockhart.

It is 1918, and Prior is in London working as an intelligence officer. His concern is the enemy within � though a clear definition of who exactly the enemy is proves harder to come by than he might have imagined.

The great city of Troy is under siege as Greek heroes Achilles and Agamemnon wage bloody war over a stolen woman. In the Greek camp, another woman is watching and waiting: Briseis. She was a queen of this land until Achilles sacked her city and murdered her husband and sons. Now she is Achilles' concubine: a prize of battle. Briseis is just one among thousands of women backstage in this war - the slaves and prostitutes, the nurses, the women who lay out the dead - all of them voiceless in history. 

This novel challenges our assumptions about relationships between the classes, doctors and patients, men and women, and men and men. It completes the author's exploration of the First World War, and is a timeless depiction of humanity in extremis. Winner of the 1995 Booker Prize.

Toby's Room opens in the July of 1917, three years after the events of Life Class. Elinor Brooke is still painting, but her brother Toby is shipping out to the front as a Medical Officer, a fact that she cannot bring herself to accept. Toby finds himself on the same Channel crossing as Kit Neville, a close friend - and aspiring suitor - of Elinor's from before the war. Intent on cementing his reputation as an artist, Kit never intended to serve overseas.

Tom Seymour is a child psychologist who has worked in the north of England for many years. One day, while walking by a river near his home, he rescues a young man from drowning and realizes that it's Danny Miller, a child murderer at whose trial he once gave evidence - evidence he has since come to regard as flawed. Danny has served his sentence and is out of prison. But now he's asking for Tom's help.

As the bombs fall on the blacked-out city, ambulance driver Elinor Brooke races from bomb sites to hospitals in order to save the lives of injured survivors. She works alongside former friend Kit Neville while her husband, Paul Tarrant, 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, they now find themselves caught in another war, this time at home.

Booker Prize-winning author Pat Barker is one of Britain's most powerful contemporary novelists. This eerie story of a troubled family in the north of England lets you experience the full force of Barker's original talent. Filled with startling images and incisive character studies, Another World reveals an uncanny reality where emotions and events from the past resurface in the present.

Penguin presents the unabridged, downloadable audiobook edition of 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.

Spring, 1914. The students at the Slade School of Art gather in Henry Tonks's studio for his life-drawing class. But for Paul Tarrant the class is troubling, underscoring his own uncertainty about making a mark on the world. When war breaks out and the army won't take Paul, he enlists in the Belgian Red Cross just as he and fellow student Elinor Brooke admit their feelings for one another.

Insomnia, exhaustion, recurring nightmares. Stephen Sharkey is suffering the after effects 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.

In the spring of 1914, a group of young students gather in an art studio for a life-drawing class. Paul Tarrant and Elinor Brooke are two components of a love triangle, and at the outset of the war, they turn to each other. After volunteering for the Red Cross, Paul must confront the fact that life, love, and art will never be the same for him.

The Eye in the Door is the richly deserving winner of the 1993 Guardian Fiction Prize, the second volume in Pat Barker's brilliant Regeneration Trilogy. Written with immense power, it is the story not just of one young man suffering from the trauma of war, but of a generation condemned to the unending slaughter of the trenches.

Double Vision follows Kate, a sculptor whose photojournalist husband is killed in Afghanistan, and Stephen, a journalist who, after covering September 11 with Kate's husband and then being betrayed by his wife, has determined to retire to a small town and write a book about violence.

Penguin presents the unabridged, downloadable audiobook edition of Noonday by Pat Barker, read by Juliet Stevenson, Stephen Boxer, John Sackville, Anne Reid & Finlay Robertson. London, the Blitz, autumn 1940. Ambulance drivers Elinor Brooke and Kit Neville ferry injured survivors from bomb sites to hospitals while Elinor's husband, Paul, works as an air-raid warden.

Craiglockhart, a hospital for officers ravaged by their experiences in trench warfare, is the setting for Pat Barker's Regeneration. Here the poet Siegfried Sassoon, author of an article condemning the war, came under the care of psychiatrist W.H.R Rivers whose duty, as he saw it, was to return Sassoon to all the horrors of the Front, because Sassoon was sane, was healthy, and he had made a commitment.

As Tom Seymour walks with his wife along the river Tyne, they see a young man jump from the jetty into the freezing water. Instinctively, Tom rescues him. But his act saves the life of Danny Miller, whose past, as well as whose future, will come to haunt Tom.

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.