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
By Pat Barker
The Booker Prize 1995
Pat Barker’s First World War Regeneration Trilogy had already built up a head of critical steam, so there was a sense of rightness when the final volume, The Ghost Road, triumphed.
Barker’s win was acclaimed as an example of right winner, right book – not always the case. She saw off two former winners – Salman Rushdie (The Moor’s Last Sigh) and Barry Unsworth (Morality Play) – on her way to a victory that she saw as a means of promoting fiction generally rather than just her own work.
Her themes – the pity of war, sympathy for the shell-shocked and homosexuality, ambivalence to empire – were adroitly handled and hit a receptive moment in time.
The Ghost Road
Winner of The Booker Prize 1995
- By
- Pat Barker
- Published by
- Viking
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
The shortlist
Justin Cartwright introduces the reader to Anthony Northleach, and one intense, comic and horrifying day in his life
Salman Rushdie asks what we do when the world’s walls - its family structures, its value-systems, its political forms - start to crumble
Barry Unsworth’s detective story set in the 14th century, a time of calamity such as few others have been, marked by war, plague and fear of hellfire
Tim Winton depicts a man’s desperate quest across Europe, as he tries to track down his missing wife
By Tim Winton
