Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time


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Ghosts everywhere. Even the living were only ghosts in the making.

The Ghost Road by Pat Barker

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This is the third and final part of the Regeneration trilogy which culminated in this novel winning the Booker Prize. I think ultimately the second novel is the better, and best of the three, but I won’t fault the Booker Prize for recognizing the quality of the series, and probably wish it had done more of this in its time (well, I guess it kind of did this with Paul Scott’s Staying On) (Anyway!). In this third volume we meet back with Billy Prior who […]

Half the world’s work’s done by hopeless neurotics

Eye in the Door by Pat Barker

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This is the second book in the “Regeneration” trilogy. I read the first book a few years ago and kind of felt a little ambivalent about it. It’s possible I would still feel that way if I read it again, but I also barely recall any specific details. In broad terms, it’s about a WWI combat psychologist in England dealing with the trauma of soldiers wounded in the war or experiencing PTSD. It also focuses particularly on the case of Siegfried Sassoon, the famous poet, […]

World War I Novels Never End Happily

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#cbr10bingo This is the End The Ghost Road is the third and final volume in Pat Barker’s Regeneration trilogy. Set during WWI in England, the trilogy tells the story of both real and fictional characters trying to make sense of a senseless war. The first book focused on the patients at Craiglockhart Hospital, an asylum for soldiers suffering from shell shock and being treated so as to be sent back to the front. Book two centered on the fictional character Billy Prior, a soldier recovering […]

Psychological Conflict Management

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In volume one of Pat Barker’s award winning Regeneration Trilogy, readers experienced life in a hospital for English soldiers suffering from “war neurosis” (PTSD) during WWI. Barker uses both fictional and real historical characters (Siegfried Sassoon, Wilfred Owen, Dr. Rivers) to show the trauma of war for soldiers expected to heal and return to action, and the impact of their experiences upon the doctor treating them. At the end of that novel, Rivers’ patients are being released back to action, which was his goal, but […]

Not just another WWI novel

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#cbr10bingo And So It Begins Pat Barker’s Booker-nominated first volume of the Regeneration Trilogy takes place during World War I and, unsurprisingly, deals with the trauma and horror of that conflict. What sets her work apart from other WWI novels, however, is that the action takes place not at the front but at an asylum for British soldiers suffering from what we would now call PTSD. Many of the characters in Regeneration are real people who really knew each other in London and at Craiglockhart […]

A Spark that Didn’t Catch Fire

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I really don’t know when and how I ended up with multiple novels by Pat Barker on my kindle, but here we are. And knowing that a few of them belonged to a series, I opted to read Border Crossing, a book dealing with child offenders of serious crimes, and examining the idea of people changing and finding redemption years later. Or is evil an inherent trait that can be found in children as well as adults? Honestly, the whole thing sounded kind of like that […]



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