The Ghost Road by Pat Barker (Regeneration #3) (Paperback)

*Please note: The first image serves as a representation, while the second to fourth images show the physical book itself.

The Ghost Road, which won the 1995 Booker Prize, is the final volume of the Regeneration trilogy. The earlier volumes, Regeneration and The Eye in the Door, winner of the 1993 Guardian Fiction Prize, are also published in Penguin.

The Ghost Road is the final novel in Pat Barker’s acclaimed World War I trilogy. Set during the final months of this brutal conflict, the story follows the lives of those marked by the horrors of war. In France, soldiers endure relentless trench warfare, each a “ghost in the making.” In England, Dr. William Rivers, a psychologist grappling with guilt, works to treat soldiers’ mental scars just enough for them to return to battle. One of his patients, Billy Prior, a sharp and fearless officer from the working class, chooses to go back to the front with poet and fellow officer Wilfred Owen, despite losing faith in the war. Meanwhile, Rivers, battling influenza, recalls his time studying a South Pacific tribe whose culture centered on death, prompting him to question society’s views on conflict and mortality. Through these parallel experiences, Rivers gains insights that challenge both his and our views on war.

‘The Ghost Road is a startlingly good novel… With the other two volumes of the trilogy, it forms one of the. richest and most rewarding works of fiction of recent times. Intricately plotted,. beautifully written, skilfully assembled, tender, horrifying and funny, it lives on in the imagination, like the war it so imaginatively and so intelligently explores’ Peter Parker, The Times Literary Supplement