The Ghost Road

August 1918: Lieutenant Billy Prior is on his way back to France. Passing through London, he says goodbye to his psychologist, William Rivers, who tells him that those who recover from 'shell-shock' and return to the fighting are the real test cases for the therapies practised at Craiglockhart War Hospital, where Prior had been his patient.

Back in France, together with his fellow 'test case' Wilfrid Owen, Prior believes the war can do nothing to surprise him. But from the idyllic week he spends among the ruins of Amiens to the moment when, staggering out of the line after the battle of Joncourt, he watches the setting sun rise again, he is continually astonished. He survives to face the crossing of the Sambre-Oise canal, an action even the ferocious Colonel Marshall describes as insane.

Meanwhile Rivers, feverish with Spanish influenza, remembers Eddystone Island, where he lived before the war among a community of former headhunters. Across the gulf between his society and theirs, he starts to form connections which cast new light on his experience of war.

The Ghost Road challenges our assumptions about the relationships between the classes, between doctors and patients, men and women, and men and men. Pat Barker's Regeneration was described in the TLS as 'one of the most impressive novels to have appeared in recent years'; The Eye in the Door, the winner of the 1993 Guardian fiction prize, 'extended', said the Sunday Telegraph, 'the boundaries not only of the anti-war novel, but of fiction generally'. The Ghost Road completes the author's brilliant exploration of the First World War, and is a timeless depiction of humanity in extremis.