The Ghost Road, Pat Barker
The Ghost Road, Pat Barker
List: $20.00 | Sale: $14.00
Club: $10.00

The Ghost Road
Booker Prize Winner (A Novel)

Author: Pat Barker

Narrator: Simon Russell Beale

Unabridged: 6 hr 53 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Publisher: Penguin Audio

Published: 05/13/2025


Synopsis

 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

About The Author

PAT BARKER has earned a place in the first rank of contemporary British writers with such novels as Union Street, Regeneration (shortlisted for Britain's prestigious Booker Prize and chosen by the New York Times as one of the four best novels of 1992), The Eye in the Door (winner of the 1993 Guardian fiction prize), and The Ghost Road (winner of the 1995 Booker Prize). The latter three novels are available in Dutton hardcover and Plume paperback editions. Pat Barker lives in Durham, England.


Reviews

Goodreads review by Megan on May 19, 2014

What becomes of us when all we know is death and killing, and that is taken away? If that is the question being asked, the answer is not forthcoming. The book ends just before the war does, so we never get to see how any surviving characters would reintegrate into civilian life. From their worries, t......more

Goodreads review by Fabian on February 10, 2020

Compared with (previous war novel read) “Empire of the Sun,” this WWI novel actually evades the battlefield, to the benefit of everyone, I suppose. No—this one is more “Best Years of Our Lives” with raunchy sex and modern yearnings for release, than, say, other bloody epics like "Gone with the Wind"......more

Goodreads review by Karen on July 22, 2008

I can't say enough good about this trilogy. In an interview with Pat Barker, she described growing up in a home where she saw the lifetime of effects of WWI. Struggling with the effects of a war she didn't live through, her obsession lead to a brilliantly re-imagined world, much of it based on histo......more

Goodreads review by Kirsten on April 13, 2024

My love of the war poets is due to this fantastic series, I think my world changed when I first read Wilfred Owen’s poems.......more


Quotes

Praise for The Ghost Road

“Complex and ambitious...the masterwork to date of a singular and ever-evolving novelist who has consistently made up her own rules.”—The New York Times

“A literary achievement...Remarkable...A fine, singularly intelligent and deeply moving novel.”—San Francisco Chronicle

“Persuasive and original...Pat Barker presents the First World War as the test tube of the human spirit.”—The New Yorker

“Ambitious...convincing...challenging.”—The Wall Street Journal

“The novelist Milan Kundera says that fiction was invented to discover truth. A book like The Ghost Road is what he must have had in mind. Barker writes brilliantly—wisely.”—The Washington Post

“A triumph of the imagination at once poetic and practical...Barker has succeeded in ways that define the novelist’s art: by close observation as well as by deployment of a broad and painfully compassionate vision, all rendered in prose whose very simplicity speaks volumes...Deeply eloquent.”—Publishers Weekly


Awards

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