Another World
The Regeneration Trilogy (Regeneration,The Eye in the Door, andThe Ghost Road) established Pat Barker as one of the most powerful and versatile novelists writing today. Her eighth novel,Another World, is a powerful and complex tale of family, memory, illness, and war. Haunted by memories of the First World War, Geordie is dying of cancer, while his grandson Nick, haunted by the violence of families past (and present), struggles with his thoroughly modern marriage: angry stepchildren, exhausting toddler, miserably pregnant wife. Wracked by guilt, Geordie relives his brother's death in the trenches and his mother's grieving verdict: "It should have been  you." Uncovering the intimate and public reach of Geordie's history, Nick is forced up against the "power of old wounds to leak into the present" and the paradoxical fragility--or pliancy--of personal memory. Weaving into her fictional worlds some of the  most disturbing images of contemporary Britain--including that of "an older boy taking a toddler by the hand while his companion strides ahead, eager for the atrocity to come"--Barker draws her themes together into a remarkable, sometimes  ruthless, study of family life and death.--Vicky Lebeau, Amazon.co.uk