Regeneration » (Reprint)

One of Britain's most acclaimed contemporary novelists, Booker Prize-winner Pat Barker is known for her Regeneration trilogy, which brought readers a compelling look at the World War I period.

In 1917 Seigfried Sasson, noted poet and decorated war hero, publicly refused to continue serving as a British officer in World War I. His reason: The war was a senseless slaughter. He was officially classified "mentally unsound" and sent to Craiglockhart War Hospital. There a brilliant psychiatrist, Dr. William Rivers, set about restoring Sassoon's "sanity" and sending him back to the trenches. This novel tells what happened as only a novel can. It is a war saga in which not a shot is fired. It is a story of a battle for a man's mind in which only the reader can decide who is the victor, who the vanquished, and who the victim. It is one of the most amazing feats of fiction of our time. Regeneration is the first novel in Pat Barker's acclaimed World War I trilogy, which continues with The Eye in the Door and culminates in the 1995 Booker Prize-winning The Ghost Road.

New York Times Books of the Century

...[A] magnificent antiwar novel and a wonderful justification of her belief that plain writing, energized by the named things of the world, will change readers profoundly by bringing them deep into imagined lives. (1992)