Regeneration

Regeneration is Pat Barker's classic, Booker-nominated novel is the classic exploration of how the traumas of war brutalised a generation of young men.

"A brilliant novel. Intense and subtle."  - Peter Kemp, Sunday Times

Craiglockhart War Hospital, Scotland, 1917, and army psychiatrist William Rivers is treating shell-shocked soldiers. Under his care are the poets Siegfried Sassoon and Wilfred Owen, as well as mute Billy Prior, who is only able to communicate by means of pencil and paper. Rivers' job is to make the men in his charge healthy enough to fight. Yet the closer he gets to mending his patients' minds the harder becomes every decision to send them back to the horrors of the front. 

"A vivid evocation of the agony of the First World War and a multi-layered exploration of all wars. A fine anthem for doomed youth."  -  Time Out

Pat Barker began her literary career in her 40s, after taking a short writing course taught by Angela Carter. She has now published 16 novels, including her masterful Regeneration trilogy, and has been made a CBE for services to literature. Her novel The Silence of the Girls began the story of Briseis, the forgotten woman at the heart of one of the most famous war epics ever told, and was shortlisted for the Women’s Prize for Fiction, the Costa Novel Award and the Gordon Burn Prize, and won the Independent Bookshop Award 2019.