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The Ghost Road

Booker Prize Winner (A Novel)

Author Pat Barker
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On sale May 13, 2025 | 6 Hours and 54 Minutes | 9798217077830

 The final book in the Regeneration Trilogy, and winner of the 1995 Booker Prize
 
The Ghost Road is the culminating masterpiece of Pat Barker's towering World War I fiction trilogy. The time of the novel is the closing months of the most senselessly savage of modern conflicts. In France, millions of men engaged in brutal trench warfare are all "ghosts in the making." In England, psychologist William Rivers, with severe pangs of conscience, treats the mental casualties of the war to make them whole enough to fight again. One of these, Billy Prior, risen to the officer class from the working class, both courageous and sardonic, decides to return to France with his fellow officer, poet Wilfred Owen, to fight a war he no longer believes in. Meanwhile, Rivers, enfevered by influenza, returns in memory to his experience studying a South Pacific tribe whose ethos amounted to a culture of death. Across the gulf between his society and theirs, Rivers begins to form connections that cast new light on his--and our--understanding of war.

Combining poetic intensity with gritty realism, blending biting humor with tragic drama, moving toward a denouement as inevitable as it is devastating, The Ghost Road both encapsulates history and transcends it. It is a modern masterpiece
  • WINNER
    Los Angeles Times Book Prize
  • WINNER
    Man Booker Prize for Fiction
© Justine Stoddard

Pat Barker is the author of Union StreetBlow Your House DownLiza’s EnglandThe Man Who Wasn't There, the Regeneration trilogy (RegenerationThe Eye in the Door, and The Ghost Road, which won the Booker Prize), Another WorldBorder CrossingDouble Vision, and the Life Class trilogy (Life ClassToby's Room, and Noonday). She lives in Durham, England.

View titles by Pat Barker

About

 The final book in the Regeneration Trilogy, and winner of the 1995 Booker Prize
 
The Ghost Road is the culminating masterpiece of Pat Barker's towering World War I fiction trilogy. The time of the novel is the closing months of the most senselessly savage of modern conflicts. In France, millions of men engaged in brutal trench warfare are all "ghosts in the making." In England, psychologist William Rivers, with severe pangs of conscience, treats the mental casualties of the war to make them whole enough to fight again. One of these, Billy Prior, risen to the officer class from the working class, both courageous and sardonic, decides to return to France with his fellow officer, poet Wilfred Owen, to fight a war he no longer believes in. Meanwhile, Rivers, enfevered by influenza, returns in memory to his experience studying a South Pacific tribe whose ethos amounted to a culture of death. Across the gulf between his society and theirs, Rivers begins to form connections that cast new light on his--and our--understanding of war.

Combining poetic intensity with gritty realism, blending biting humor with tragic drama, moving toward a denouement as inevitable as it is devastating, The Ghost Road both encapsulates history and transcends it. It is a modern masterpiece

Awards

  • WINNER
    Los Angeles Times Book Prize
  • WINNER
    Man Booker Prize for Fiction

Author

© Justine Stoddard

Pat Barker is the author of Union StreetBlow Your House DownLiza’s EnglandThe Man Who Wasn't There, the Regeneration trilogy (RegenerationThe Eye in the Door, and The Ghost Road, which won the Booker Prize), Another WorldBorder CrossingDouble Vision, and the Life Class trilogy (Life ClassToby's Room, and Noonday). She lives in Durham, England.

View titles by Pat Barker

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