Regeneration

Pat Barker's First World War trilogy opens with Siegfried Sassoon sent to Craiglockhart War Hospital in 1917, not because he is ill but because he has publicly declared the war a deliberate prolonging of suffering. The doctor assigned to him, the anthropologist and psychiatrist W.H.R. Rivers, has to decide what curing a man can mean when recovery returns him to the trenches. Real figures move alongside the invented Billy Prior, a working-class officer through whom the trilogy examines class as closely as it does shell shock. The Ghost Road won the Booker Prize in 1995.