Where to start with Pat Barker

British novelist, born 1943. Won the Booker Prize in 1995.

Best Pat Barker book to start with: The Ghost Road (1995), on 2 of the 21 lists it could have made.

Start with Regeneration. It is the first book of her First World War trilogy, short and gripping, and the index lists the whole trilogy as well, but the single volume is the better way in. It is set in a military hospital where officers are treated for shell shock, and one of the patients is the poet Siegfried Sassoon.

The Ghost Road is the final volume of the trilogy and won the Booker Prize in 1995. Read the trilogy in order, because each book builds on the one before.

If the trenches are not for you, The Silence of the Girls retells the Trojan War from the point of view of the captive Briseis. It is her most recent book on the index, and it was shortlisted for the Women’s Prize in 2019 and the Costa in 2018. Toby’s Room, shortlisted for the Walter Scott Prize in 2013, returns to the war years from the home front. Read it after Regeneration, since the war and its wounded are the subject of both.