Bøger af Pat Barker

Penguin presents the audiobook edition of The Silence of the Girls by Pat Barker, read by Kristin Atherton and Michael Fox. From the Booker Prize-winning author of Regeneration and one of our greatest contemporary writers on war comes a re-imagining of the most famous conflict in literature - the legendary Trojan War. The great city of Troy is under siege as Greek heroes Achilles and Agamemnon wage bloody war over a stolen woman. In the Greek camp, another woman is watching and waiting: Briseis. She was a queen of this land until Achilles sacked her city and murdered her husband and sons. Now she is Achilles concubine: a prize of battle. Briseis is just one among thousands of women backstage in this war - the slaves and prostitutes, the nurses, the women who lay out the dead - all of them voiceless in history. But, though no one knows it yet, they are just ten weeks away from the death of Achilles and the Fall of Troy, an end to this long and bitter conflict. Briseis will see it all - and she will bear witness.

The devastating, Booker Prize-winning modern classic of contemporary war fiction from the Women's Prize-shortlisted author of The Silence of the Girls'One of the few real masterpieces of late twentieth-century British fiction' Jonathan Coe 'Harrowing, original, delicate and unforgettable' Independent'A new vision of what the First World War did to human beings, male and female, soldiers and civilians. Constantly surprising and formally superb' A. S. Byatt, Daily Telegraph1917, Scotland. At Craiglockhart War Hospital in Scotland, army psychiatrist William Rivers treats shell-shocked soldiers before sending them back to the front. In his care are poets Siegfried Sassoon and Wilfred Owen, and Billy Prior, who is only able to communicate by means of pencil and paper. . .Regeneration, The Eye in the Door and The Ghost Road follow the stories of these men until the last months of the war. Widely acclaimed and admired, Pat Barker's Regeneration trilogy paints with moving detail the far-reaching consequences of a conflict which decimated a generation. The Regeneration trilogy:RegenerationThe Eye in the DoorThe Ghost Road

From the Booker Prize-winning author of The Regeneration Trilogy comes the powerful third installment to the Women of Troy series. I never saw Cassandra as a victim. I saw a woman as focused on a single aim as any raptor stooping to its prey; but then, I had more opportunities to observe her ruthlessness than most. I was in her power, you see. I was her slave. Pat Barker has crafted the latest in a brilliant reimagining of Greek mythology, and The Voyage Home is the work of a writer at the height of her powers. In this third outing, she follows the young Ritsa and the unpredictable Cassandra on their perilous return journey to Mycenae. Cassandra has acquired the powers of prophecy from the kiss of Apollo, but the very same god has taken away the people's belief in her abilities. Though she warns of the carnage that awaits the Greek warrior king Agamemnon--who numbs himself with alcohol on the storm-plagued trip home--her shipmates disregard her. While Cassandra's prophecies fall on deaf ears, Ritsa instead remains focused on surviving once they make land. When a mysterious young girl begins to shadow them, and Agamemnon's cruelty takes a new turn, Ritsa must find a safe place for Cassandra, whose mood alternates between cruelty and frenzy. But it's the ongoing ire between Queen Clytemnestra and Agamemnon that could prove fatal for everyone. In The Voyage Home, Barker elevates myth and legend and asks us to examine the stories we hold dear through a feminist lens, and in doing so she has crafted a tale that upholds her legacy as one of our finest contemporary novelists.

From the Booker Prize-winning author of The Regeneration Trilogy comes the powerful third installment to the Women of Troy series. I never saw Cassandra as a victim. I saw a woman as focused on a single aim as any raptor stooping to its prey; but then, I had more opportunities to observe her ruthlessness than most. I was in her power, you see. I was her slave. Pat Barker has crafted the latest in a brilliant reimagining of Greek mythology, and The Voyage Home is the work of a writer at the height of her powers. In this third outing, she follows the young Ritsa and the unpredictable Cassandra on their perilous return journey to Mycenae. Cassandra has acquired the powers of prophecy from the kiss of Apollo, but the very same god has taken away the people's belief in her abilities. Though she warns of the carnage that awaits the Greek warrior king Agamemnon--who numbs himself with alcohol on the storm-plagued trip home--her shipmates disregard her. While Cassandra's prophecies fall on deaf ears, Ritsa instead remains focused on surviving once they make land. When a mysterious young girl begins to shadow them, and Agamemnon's cruelty takes a new turn, Ritsa must find a safe place for Cassandra, whose mood alternates between cruelty and frenzy. But it's the ongoing ire between Queen Clytemnestra and Agamemnon that could prove fatal for everyone. In The Voyage Home, Barker elevates myth and legend and asks us to examine the stories we hold dear through a feminist lens, and in doing so she has crafted a tale that upholds her legacy as one of our finest contemporary novelists.

THE EXHILARATING FOLLOW-UP TO PAT BARKER'S THE WOMEN OF TROY AND THE SILENCE OF THE GIRLSAfter ten blood-filled years, the war is over. Troy lies in smoking ruins as the victorious Greeks fill their ships with the spoils of battle.Alongside the treasures looted are the many Trojan women captured by the Greeks - among them the legendary prophetess Cassandra, and her watchful maid, Ritsa. Enslaved as concubine - war-wife - to King Agamemnon, Cassandra is plagued by visions of his death - and her own - while Ritsa is forced to bear witness to both Cassandra's frenzies and the horrors to come.Meanwhile, awaiting the fleet's return is Queen Clytemnestra, vengeful wife of Agamemnon. Heart-shattered by her husband's choice to sacrifice their eldest daughter to the gods in exchange for a fair wind to Troy, she has spent this long decade plotting retribution, in a palace haunted by child-ghosts.As one wife journeys toward the other, united by the vision of Agamemnon's death, one thing is certain: this long-awaited homecoming will change everyone's fates forever.'The queen of literary historical fiction, Barker is an unflinching guide for a trip across ancient Greece' National Geographic'In her thrilling retelling of the stories of Cassandra and Clytemnestra, Barker conjures up a world stained by the grief of mothers and daughters. Agamemnon's palace is the stuff of nightmares, a world of suspicion and fear, plagued by the ghosts of innocents' Paula Hawkins'You go to her for plain truths, a driving storyline and a clear eye, steadily facing the history of our world' GuardianInstant Sunday Times bestseller, August 2024

Set in the closing months of World War I, this towering novel combines poetic intenstiy with gritty realism as it brings Pat Barker's Regeneration trilogy to its stunning conclusion.In France, millions of men engaged in brutal trench warfare are all "ghosts in the making." In England, psychologist William Rivers, with severe pangs of conscience, treats the mental casualties of the war to make them whole enough to fight again. One of these, Billy Prior, risen to the officer class from the working class, both courageous and sardonic, decides to return to France with his fellow officer, poet Wilfred Owen, to fight a war he no longer believes in. Meanwhile, Rivers, enfevered by influenza returns in memory to his experience studying a South Pacific tribe whose ethos amounted to a culture of death. Across the gulf between his society and theirs, Rivers begins to form connections that cast new light on his-and our-understanding of war.Winner of the 1995 Booker Prize

Double Vision from Pat Barker, a gripping novel about the effects of violence on the journalists and artists who have dedicated themselves to representing itIn the aftermath of September 11, 2001, reeling from the effects of reporting from New York City, two British journalists, a writer, Stephen Sharkey, and a photographer, Ben Frobisher, part ways. Stephen, facing the almost simultaneous discovery that his wife is having an affair, returns to England shattered; he divorces and quits his job. Ben returns to his vocation. He follows the war on terror to Afghanistan and is killed. Stephen retreats to a cottage in the country to write a book about violence, and what he sees as the reporting journalist's or photographer's complicity in it; it is a book that will build in large part on Ben's writing and photography. Ben's widow, Kate, a sculptor, lives nearby, and as she and Stephen learn about each other their world speedily shrinks, in pleasing but also disturbing ways; Stephen's maid, with whom he has begun an affair, was once lovers with Kate's new studio assistant, an odd local man named Peter. As these connections become clear, Peter's strange behavior around Stephen and Kate begins to take on threatening implications. The sinister events that take place in this small town, so far from the theaters of war Stephen has retreated from, will force him to act instinctively, violently, and to face his most painful revelations about himself.

In Pat Barker's The Man Who Wasn't There, twelve-year-old Colin knows little about his father except that he must have fought in the war. His mother, totally absorbed by the nightclub where she works, says nothing about him, and Colin turns to films for images of what his father might have been. Weaving in and out of Colin's real life, his imagined film explores issues of loyalty and betrayal and searches for the answer to the question 'What is a man?'

In Pat Barker's Liza's England, Liza Garrett is the first child in town born in the twentieth century--whose life in many ways mirrors the turmoils of England itself. The tough, severe, but very real and recognizable world of women is put to the most strenuous tests, and Liza, at eighty-four, is proof that loyalty, fortitude and humor survive.

Tom Seymour is a child psychiatrist who has worked in the north of England for many years. One day, while walking by the river, he rescues a young man from drowning, and realizes it's a child murderer at whose trial he gave flawed evidence.

Union Street, Pat Barker's first novel, concerns seven neighboring women near a factory in northeast England. Life for these women is trying: some of them are married to alcoholics, some are victims of abuse; one is old and near death, another is still a child but has the experience of an adult; all are struggling to survive. First published in 1982, it was made into the film Stanley & Iris by MGM in 1989, starring Robert DeNiro and Jane Fonda Blow Your House Down, Barker's second novel, also portrays the lives of women in industrial England--but these women are prostitutes, living in a northern England city that is stalked by a vicious, Jack the Ripper-style serial killer who is singling out women with nowhere else to go.

A new stage adaptation of Pat Barker's acclaimed novel about World War One, and poets Siegfried Sassoon and Wilfred Owen.

From the Booker Prize-winning and Women's Prize-shortlisted author of The Silence of the Girls The final novel in Pat Barker's acclaimed 'Life Class' trilogy - an unforgettable story of art and war, from one of our greatest writers on war and the human heart'Bold, hard-hitting, unforgettable, with luminous and unsparing insight' Independent on Sunday'Barker's command of detail and gift for metaphor are as sharp as ever... Noonday is in the first rank' Mail on Sunday'[There is] no end to her talent in describing how conflicts rupture the soul' Arifa Akbar, IndependentLondon, the Blitz, autumn 1940. As the bombs fall on the blacked-out city, ambulance driver Elinor Brooke races from bomb sites to hospitals trying to save the lives of injured survivors, working alongside former friend Kit Neville, while her husband Paul works as an air-raid warden. As the bombing intensifies, the constant risk of death makes all three of them reach out for quick consolation. Old loves and obsessions re-surface until Elinor is brought face to face with an almost impossible choice. Writing about the Second World War for the first time, Pat Barker brings the besieged and haunted city of London into electrifying life.The Life Class trilogy:Life ClassToby's RoomNoonday

Penguin presents the unabridged, downloadable audiobook edition of the second novel in Pat Barkers acclaimed Life Class trilogy - a dark and compelling examination of desire, friendship and the horror of war, from one of our greatest writers on war and the human heart From the Booker Prize-winning and Womens Prize-shortlisted author of The Silence of the Girls Heart-rending... Tobys Room anatomises a world where extreme emotion shatters the boundaries of identity, behaviour, gender Independent Once again Barker skilfully moves between past and present, seamlessly weaving fact and fiction into a gripping narrative Sunday Telegraph When Toby is reported Missing, Believed Killed, another secret casts a lengthening shadow over Elinors world: how exactly did Toby die - and why? Elinor determines to uncover the truth. Only then can she finally close the door to Tobys room. Moving from the Slade School of Art to Queen Marys Hospital, where surgery and art intersect in the rebuilding of the shattered faces of the wounded, Tobys Room is a riveting drama of identity, damage, intimacy and loss. The Life Class trilogy: Life Class Tobys Room Noonday

The Booker Prize-winning final novel in Pat Barker's classic 'Regeneration' trilogy - from the acclaimed author of The Silence of the Girls'An extraordinary tour de force. One of the few real masterpieces of late twentieth-century British fiction' Jonathan Coe'Powerful, deeply moving... A triumph' Sunday Times'Harrowing, original, unforgettable' Independent1918, the closing months of the war. Army psychiatrist William Rivers is increasingly concerned for the men who have been in his care - particularly Billy Prior, who is about to return to combat in France with young poet Wilfred Owen. As Rivers tries to make sense of what, if anything, he has done to help these injured men, Prior and Owen await the final battles in a war that has decimated a generation. The Ghost Road is a vivid and unforgettable account of the devastating final months of the First World War.The Regeneration Trilogy:RegenerationThe Eye in the DoorThe Ghost Road

The masterful second novel in Pat Barker's classic 'Regeneration' trilogy - from the Booker Prize-winning and Women's Prize-shortlisted author of The Silence of the GirlsWINNER OF THE 1993 GUARDIAN FICTION PRIZE'Spellbinding and startlingly original' Sunday Telegraph'Gripping, moving, profoundly intelligent' Independent on Sunday'A new vision of what the First World War did to human beings, male and female, soldiers and civilians' A. S. Byatt, Daily TelegraphLondon, 1918. Billy Prior is working for Intelligence in the Ministry of Munitions. But his private encounters with women and men - pacifists, objectors, homosexuals - conflict with his duties as a soldier, and it is not long before his sense of himself fragments and breaks down. Forced to consult the man who helped him before - army psychiatrist William Rivers - Prior must confront his inability to be the dutiful soldier his superiors wish him to be. The Eye in the Door is a heart-rending study of the contradictions of war and of those forced to live through it.The Regeneration Trilogy:RegenerationThe Eye in the DoorThe Ghost Road

The devastating modern classic of contemporary war fiction from Women's Prize-shortlisted author of The Silence of the GirlsRegeneration is the first novel in Pat Barker's Booker Prize-winning Regeneration trilogy - a powerfully moving portrait of the deep legacy of human trauma in the First World War'Brilliant, intense and subtle' Peter Kemp, Sunday Times'One of the strongest and most interesting novelists of her generation' Guardian 'Unforgettable' Sunday TelegraphCraiglockhart War Hospital, Scotland, 1917, and army psychiatrist William Rivers is treating shell-shocked soldiers. Under his care are the poets Siegfried Sassoon and Wilfred Owen, as well as mute Billy Prior, who is only able to communicate by means of pencil and paper. Rivers's job is to make the men in his charge healthy enough to fight. Yet the closer he gets to mending his patients' minds the harder becomes every decision to send them back to the horrors of the front. Pat Barker's Regeneration is the classic exploration of how the traumas of war brutalised a generation of young men.The Regeneration trilogy:RegenerationThe Eye in the DoorThe Ghost Road

Penguin presents the unabridged, downloadable audiobook edition of the first novel in Pat Barkers acclaimed Life Class trilogy - an unforgettable story of art and war, from one of our greatest writers on war and the human heart From the Booker Prize-winning and Womens Prize-shortlisted author of The Silence of the Girls Triumphant, inspiring, shattering The Times Barker writes as brilliantly as ever... With great tenderness and insight she conveys a wartime world turned upside down Independent on Sunday Masterly, gripping Penelope Lively Extraordinarily powerful Sunday Telegraph Spring, 1914. The students at the Slade School of Art gather in Henry Tonkss studio for his life-drawing class. But for Paul Tarrant the class is troubling, underscoring his own uncertainty about making a mark on the world. When war breaks out and the army wont take Paul, he enlists in the Belgian Red Cross just as he and fellow student Elinor Brooke admit their feelings for one another. Amidst the devastation in Ypres, Paul comes to see the world anew - but have his experiences changed him completely? The Life Class trilogy: Life Class Tobys Room Noonday

From the Booker Prize-winning and Women's Prize-shortlisted author of The Silence of the Girls'Gripping in the best, most exquisite sense of the word' Mail on Sunday'Utterly compelling... She is a novelist who probes deep, revealing what people prefer to keep hidden' Scotsman'Extraordinary... Without question the best novel I have read this year' Daily Mail'Brilliant touches of observation, an unfailing ear for dialogue... This is a novel that doesn't allow you to miss a sentence' New York Times Book ReviewAt 101 years old, Geordie, a proud Somme veteran, lingers painfully through the days before his death. His grandson Nick is anguished to see this once-resilient man haunted by the ghosts of the trenches and the horror surrounding his brother's death. But in Nick's family home the dark pressures of the past also encroach on the present. As he and his wife Fran try to unite their uneasy family of step- and half-siblings, the discovery of a sinister Victorian drawing reveals the murderous history of their house and casts a violent shadow on their lives...

An unflinching novel on the nature of evil from the Booker Prize-winning and Women's Prize-shortlisted author of The Silence of the Girls'Rich, surprising, breathtaking' The Times'A tremendous piece of writing, sad and terrifying. It keeps you reading, exhausted and blurry-eyed, until 2am' Independent on Sunday'Barker probes not only the mysteries of 'evil' but society's horrified and incoherent response to it' Guardian 'Brilliantly crafted. Unflinching yet sensitive, this is a dark story expertly told' Daily Mail When Tom Seymour, a child psychologist, plunges into a river to save a young man from drowning, he unwittingly reopens a chapter from his past he'd hoped to forget. For Tom already knows Danny Miller. When Danny was ten Tom helped imprison him for the killing of an old woman. Now out of prison with a new identity, Danny has some questions - questions he thinks only Tom can answer. Reluctantly, Tom is drawn back into Danny's world - a place where the border between good and evil, innocence and guilt is blurred and confused. But when Danny's demands on Tom become extreme, Tom wonders whether he has crossed a line of his own - and in crossing it, can he ever go back?

From the Booker Prize-winning and Women's Prize-shortlisted author of The Silence of the GirlsA powerfully thought-provoking portrait of modern warfare from one of the modern masters of war fiction'Barker is one of our most significant contemporary novelists' Daily Telegraph'The characters grab hold at the beginning and never loosen their grip. Barker holds us by the sheer beauty of her writing' Financial Times 'Barker has a quite extraordinary ability to combine complexity and clarity and to make both seem parts of the same whole' Sunday TimesReturning to Afghanistan after his photographer friend is killed by a sniper, war reporter Stephen Sharkey seeks release from his nightmares in an England seemingly at peace with itself. Questioning man's inhumanity to man both abroad and at home, and whether love really can be the great redeemer, Double Vision is a searing novel of conflict in modern times.

* by one of the finest chroniclers of the lives of northern working-class women

* An early novel by one of England's most important contemporary novelists.

* an early work by the winner of the 1995 Booker Prize