Including all three novels in one volume, "Regeneration", "The Eye in the Door" and "The Ghost Road". The trilogy explores with gritty realism the whole dirty, glorious and horrifying business of war.
Winner of the Booker Prize, The Ghost Road is the brilliant conclusion to Pat Barker's World War I fiction trilogy, which began with the acclaimed and prize-winning novels Regeneration and The Eye in the Door . In the closing months of World War I, psychologist William Rivers treats the mental casualties of the war, making them whole enough to return to battle. As Dr. Rivers treats his patients, he begins to see the parallels between the culture of death in the tribes of the South Seas, where he served as a young missionary doctor, and in Europe in the grips of World War I. At the same time, Billy Prior, one of Dr. Rivers's patients, returns to France, where millions of men engaged in brutal trench warfare are all "ghosts in the making," to fight a war he no longer believes in. Combining poetic intensity with gritty realism, Pat Barker both escapsulates history and transcends it in this modern masterpiece.
'The year is now 1918 . . . 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' Peter Kemp, Sunday Times
In a World War I British military hospital, a pacifist soldier and his doctor grapple with the outrage of war. By the author of Union Street. Reprint.
To her neighbors, Mary Swann was a simple, hardworking farm wife; her delicate poems are discovered only after she is brutally murdered. The strange, evocative verses attract the attention of an earnestly self-absorbed feminist scholar, a pompous literary biographer, a virginal small-town librarian, and a curmudgeonly retired newspaper editor. But as interest increases, all traces of Swann's existence--her notebook, the first draft of her work, even her photograph--mysteriously vanish. In solving the puzzle of Swann's disappearing legacy, Carol Shields explores the larger mysteries of the nature of art, as well as the powerful forces that motivate us all.
Winner of the American Book AwardBased on the author's own experiences, this award-winning novel was the first to tell the story of the evacuation, relocation, and dispersal of Canadian citizens of Japanese ancestry during the Second World War.
An author's life is turned upside-down when her beloved oldest daughter drops out of school to sit on a corner wearing a sign that only says "goodness."
