Pat Barker interview: ‘Success can be more challenging than failure’
Thirty years after winning the Booker for The Ghost Road, Pat Barker discusses feeling like an outsider, writing about men, and the under-representation of working-class voices
The third volume of Pat Barker’s trilogy, which follows the fortunes of shell-shocked British army officers towards the end of the First World War
In 1918, Billy Prior experiences a late-summer idyll, some days of perfect beauty, before the final battles in a war that has destroyed most of his generation. In London, Prior’s psychologist, William Rivers, tends to his new patients, more young men whose lives and minds have been shattered. And remembers the primitive society on Eddystone Island where he studied as an anthropologist before the war.
Pat Barker
About the Author
Pat Barker won the Man Booker Prize in 1995 for 'The Ghost Road'. She was born in Yorkshire and began her literary career in her 40s, after taking a short writing course taught by Angela CarterWhile Ms. Barker is meticulously true to both the military and personal aspects of her history, she is never constrained by her sources
