Life Class

Все знают сказание о Троянской войне, когда огромная армия греков осадила Трою, чтобы отбить у вероломных чужаков похищенную ими царицу Елену – а заодно поживиться несметными богатствами, хранившимися за стенами города. В войне приняло участие множество великих героев, главным из которых был Ахилл – сияющий, несравненный, богоравный. В конце войны он пал жертвой предательства и коварства, однако обессмертил свое имя в веках… Но так ли гладко все было на самом деле? Лучше всего об этом знала троянская царевна Брисеида, захваченная Ахиллом во время одного из греческих набегов и ставшая его рабой и наложницей. И вот ее рассказ – о ненависти, ужасе, безысходности, лишениях, смирении… и любви.

Pat Barker, Booker prize-winning author of the Regeneration trilogy returns to WWI in this dark, compelling novel of human desire, wartime horror and the power of friendship.

Toby and Elinor, brother and sister, friends and confidants, are sharers of a dark secret, carried from the summer of 1912 into the battlefields of France and wartime London in 1917.

When Toby is reported 'Missing, Believed Killed', another secret casts a lengthening shadow over Elinor's world: how exactly did Toby die — and why? Elinor's fellow student Kit Neville was there in the fox-hole when Toby met his fate, but has secrets of his own to keep. Enlisting the help of former lover Paul Tarrant, Elinor determines to uncover the truth. Only then can she finally close the door to Toby's room.

Moving from the Slade School of Art to Queen Mary's Hospital, where surgery and art intersect in the rebuilding of the shattered faces of the wounded, Toby's Room is a riveting drama of identity, damage, intimacy and loss from the author of The Eye in the Door and The Ghost Road. It is Pat Barker's most powerful novel yet.

In Pat Barker's , the First World War casts its shadow down the generations.

At 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. .

'Gripping in the best, most exquisite sense of the word — as if something wicked were holding you in its clutches'

'Brilliant. . without question the best novel I have read this year. . once again, World War I extends its dark shadows across Pat Barker's extraordinary writing' Val Hennessy, Daily Mail

'One of the best things she has ever done' Ruth Rendell

'Utterly compelling. . she is a novelist who probes deep, revealing what people prefer to keep hidden' Allan Massie,

'Demonstrates the extraordinary immediacy and vigour of expression we have come to expect from Barker. . brilliant touches of observation, an unfailing ear for dialogue, a talent for imagery that is darting and brief but unfailingly apt. . this is a novel that doesn't allow you to miss a sentence' Barry Unsworth,

'Intensely feeling. . Geordie is a beautifully realised character, tough, humorous, and finally enigmatic' Helen Dunmore,

Pat Barker was born in 1943. Her books include the highly acclaimed trilogy, comprising , which has been filmed, , which won the Guardian Fiction Prize, and , which won the Booker Prize. The trilogy featured the 2012 list of the ten best historical novels. She is also the author of the more recent novels , and . She lives in Durham.

Border Crossing is Pat Barker's unflinching novel of darkness, evil and society. 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 Tim become extreme, Tom wonders whether he has crossed a line of his own — and in crossing it, can he ever go back? 'Brilliantly crafted. Unflinching yet sensitive, this is a dark story expertly told' Daily Mail 'A tremendous piece of writing, sad and terrifying. It keeps you reading, exhausted and blurry-eyed, until 2am' Independent on Sunday 'Resolutely unsensational but disquieting. . Barker probes not only the mysteries of 'evil' but society's horrified and incoherent response to it' Guardian 'Rich, challenging, surprising, breathtaking' The Times Pat Barker was born in 1943. Her books include the highly acclaimed Regeneration trilogy, comprising Regeneration, which has been filmed, The Eye in the Door, which won the Guardian Fiction Prize, and The Ghost Road, which won the Booker Prize. The trilogy featured the Observer's 2012 list of the ten best historical novels. She is also the author of the more recent novels Another World, Border Crossing, Double Vision, Life Class, and Toby's Room. She lives in Durham.

This gripping novel explores the effects of violence on the journalists and artists who have dedicated themselves to representing it.

In the aftermath of September 11, 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 returns to England shattered; he divorces his duplicitous wife and quits his job. Ben 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. 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. The sinister events that begin to 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.

Regeneration by Pat Barker is a classic exploration of how the traumas of war brutalised a generation of young — published as a Penguin Essential for the first time. 'I just don't think our war aims — whatever they may be — and we don't know — justify this level of slaughter.' The poets and soldiers Siegfried Sassoon and Wilfred Owen are dispatched to Craiglockhart War Hospital in Scotland in 1917. There, army psychiatrist William Rivers is treating brutalised, shell-shocked men. It is Rivers' job to fix these men and make them ready to fight again. As a witness to the traumas they have endured, can he in all conscience send them back to the horrors of the trenches?

The Eye in the Door is the second novel in Pat Barker's classic Regeneration trilogy. WINNER OF THE 1993 GUARDIAN FICTION PRIZE. London, 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. 'A new vision of what the First World War did to human beings, male and female, soldiers and civilians'A. S. Byatt, Daily Telegraph 'Every bit as waveringly intense and intelligent as its predecessor'Sunday Times 'Startlingly original. spellbinding'Sunday Telegraph 'Gripping, moving, profoundly intelligent. bursting with energy and darkly funny'Independent on Sunday Pat Barker was born in 1943. Her books include the highly acclaimed Regeneration trilogy, comprising Regeneration, which has been filmed, The Eye in the Door, which won the Guardian Fiction Prize, and The Ghost Road, which won the Booker Prize. The trilogy featured the Observer's 2012 list of the ten best historical novels. She is also the author of the more recent novels Another World, Border Crossing, Double Vision, Life Class, and Toby's Room. She lives in Durham.

Winner of the Booker Prize, is the brilliant conclusion to Pat Barker's World War I fiction trilogy, which began with the acclaimed and prize-winning novels and .

In the closing months of World War I, psychologist William Rivers treats the mental casualties of the war, making them whole enough to return to battle. As Dr. Rivers treats his patients, he begins to see the parallels between the culture of death in the tribes of the South Seas, where he served as a young missionary doctor, and in Europe in the grips of World War I. At the same time, Billy Prior, one of Dr. Rivers's patients, returns to France, where millions of men engaged in brutal trench warfare are all "ghosts in the making," to fight a war he no longer believes in.

Combining poetic intensity with gritty realism, Pat Barker both escapsulates history and transcends it in this modern masterpiece.

In Noonday, Pat Barker — the Man Booker-winning author of the definitive WWI trilogy, Regeneration — turns for the first time to WWII. 'Afterwards, it was the horses she remembered, galloping towards them out of the orange-streaked darkness, their manes and tails on fire…' London, 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. Once fellow students at the Slade School of Fine Art, before the First World War destroyed the hopes of their generation, they now find themselves caught in another war, this time at home. 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. Completing the story of Elinor Brooke, Paul Tarrant and Kit Neville, begun with Life Class and continued with Toby's Room, Noonday is both a stand-alone novel and the climax of a trilogy. Writing about the Second World War for the first time, Pat Barker brings the besieged and haunted city of London into electrifying life in her most powerful novel since the Regeneration trilogy. Praise for Pat Barker: 'She is not only a fine chronicler of war but of human nature.' Independent 'A brilliant stylist… Barker delves unflinchingly into the enduring mysteries of human motivation.' Sunday Telegraph 'You go to her for plain truths, a driving storyline and a clear eye, steadily facing the history of our world.' The Guardian 'Barker is a writer of crispness and clarity and an unflinching seeker of the germ of what it means to be human." The Herald Praise for Toby's Room: 'Heart-rending, superb, forensically observant and stylistically sublime' Independent 'Magnificent; I finished it eagerly, wanting to know what happened next, and as I read, I was enjoying, marvelling and learning' Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie 'Dark, painful, yet also tender. It succeeds brilliantly' New York Times 'The plot unfurls to a devastating conclusion. a very fine piece of work' Melvyn Bragg, New Statesman