Regeneration by Pat Barker

'A brilliant novel. Intense and subtle.' Sunday Times

Regeneration is the classic exploration of how the traumas of war brutalised a generation of young men. It is the first book in the Regeneration trilogy.

Regeneration is a work of historical fiction focusing on Craiglockhart War Hospital in Scotland in 1917.

Though Barker traces her interest in World War I back to her early childhood, she attributes the immediate inspiration for Regeneration to her husband, a neurologist, who was familiar with Dr. W.H.R. Rivers's experiments on nerve regeneration in the early twentieth century.

At least three of the novel's characters are based on real individuals who knew each other while they were at Craiglockhart. Siegfried Sassoon, a soldier and famous poet, protested the war in 1917, and for this, he was sent to the mental hospital. Wilfred Owen, perhaps the most famous war poet of his era, was also at Craiglockhart, and was greatly influenced by his older and more experienced fellow patient, Sassoon. Dr. W.H.R. Rivers, a scientist known originally for anthropological studies, served as a psychiatrist at the hospital for a short period near the end of the war; nevertheless, his influence on Sassoon was substantial. Sassoon mentioned or referred to Rivers in several publications after his "treatment."

Although Barker bases her characters on real individuals, her work is a fictional account of the period they spent together at Craiglockhart.

Regeneration is a morally nuanced anti-war novel, reflecting the issues and the concerns in wartime Britain. By focusing on the experience of Rivers, the psychiatrist who attends his patients, Barker heightens the conflict between duty and sympathy.

Principles become blurred as similar experiences are viewed through different lenses. Barker, with her insightful and direct writing style, succeeds in presenting a microcosm of "madness" in society. Yet the novel refrains from drawing conclusions for us.

Ultimately, Regeneration asks us to question for ourselves the large concepts of duty, sanity, and sympathy.

About the Author

Novelist Pat Barker was born in Thornaby-on-Tees in Yorkshire, England, on 8 May 1943. She was educated at the London School of Economics, where she read International History, and at Durham University. She taught History and Politics until 1982. She began to write in her mid-twenties and was encouraged to pursue her career as a writer by the novelist Angela Carter. Her early novels dealt with the harsh lives of working-class women living in the north of England. Her first book, Union Street (1982) won the Fawcett Society Book Prize, while her second, Blow Your House Down (1984), was adapted for the stage by Sarah Daniels in 1994. The Century's Daughter (re-published as Liza's England in 1996) was published in 1986, followed by The Man Who Wasn't There in 1989.

In 1983 she was named as one of the 20 'Best Young British Novelists' in a promotion run by the Book Marketing Council and Granta magazine. Her trilogy of novels about the First World War, which began with Regeneration in 1991, was partly inspired by her grandfather's experiences fighting in the trenches in France. Regeneration was made into a film in 1997 starring Jonathan Pryce and James Wilby. The Eye in the Door (1993), the second novel in the trilogy, won the Guardian Fiction Prize, and The Ghost Road (1995), the final novel in the series, won the Booker Prize for Fiction. Another World (1998), although set in contemporary Newcastle, is overshadowed by the memories of an old man who fought in the First World War.

Her novel Border Crossing (2001), describes the relationship between a child psychologist and a young man convicted of murder 13 years earlier. Double Vision (2003), concerns the atrocity of war and two men who are caught up in its shadow.

Pat Barker was awarded a CBE in 2000. Her most recent novel was Life Class (2007).

Watch the trailer to the 1997 film version of the book here...

Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro

Nominated for the Booker Prize and one of Mr Jenkins' favourite novelists...

'A story of love, friendship and memory, Never Let Me Go is charged throughout with a sense of the fragility of life.'

When an unorthodox teacher breaks ranks and spells the truth out to her bemused charges, we are not entirely surprised....

'You were brought into this world for a purpose, and your futures, all of them, have been decided.'

From the very first page of this thrilling dystopian vision, hints have been dropped that the pupils of Hailsham, an exclusive boarding school, are not ordinary children. There is, primarily, the way that the novel's narrator, Kathy H, who is now 31, peppers her story with unexpected and incongruous vocabulary: who are the 'donors' for whom she is a 'carer', and what does it mean when they 'complete'? Why is Kathy so proud of her meagre trappings of independence - a bedsit and car - and so alert to the jealousy they might inspire in others?

As Kathy's reminiscences of her schooldays unfold, and we learn more of her and her friends Tommy and Ruth's peculiar upbringing, the sense of mystery deepens: not only are the children clearly being groomed for an obscure mission, but their lives are also marked by other inexplicable rituals and processes, apparently designed to cut them off from the outside world.

On a cursory read, Ishiguro's novel could be seen simply as an unusual piece of nightmarish science fiction blended with an evocative reworking of the traditional boarding-school story. The deceptively plain - at times even bland - tone and style of Kathy's narration reinforce the idea that one is reading the jeu d'esprit of an exceptionally talented novelist, an exercise in manipulating form and content. But Never Let Me Go packs an emotional punch that is hard to resist. Achieved through the combination of barely articulated horror and stoical acceptance, it leaves one feeling that Ishiguro has confronted nothing less than human beings' ability to deal with their own mortality.

In a beautifully sketched moment, the three friends make a journey to see an abandoned boat, run aground in some marshes. It is simultaneously an emblem of entrapment and of the possibility of escape; but it occurs to none of them to pursue the latter option. 'At least we've seen it now,' says Tommy, with a poignancy that typifies this wonderfully understated novel.

Future imperfect - Kazuo Ishiguro explains how a radio discussion helped fill in the missing pieces of Never Let Me Go...

About the Author

Kazuo Ishiguro is the author of six novels, A Pale View of Hills (1982, Winifred Holtby Prize), An Artist of the Floating World (1986, Whitbread Book of the Year Award, Primio Scanno, shortlisted for the Booker Prize), The Remains of the Day (1989, winner of the Booker Prize), The Unconsoled (1995, winner of the Cheltenham Prize), When We Were Orphans (2000, shortlisted for the Booker Prize) and Never Let Me Go (2005, shortlisted for the MAN Booker Prize).

He received an OBE for Services to Literature in 1995, and the French decoration of Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres in 1998.

As Never Let Me Go, Kazuo Ishiguro's unsettling story of a community of clones, comes to cinema screens, Rachel Cusk finds herself both intrigued and repelled by the novel...

Andrew Garfield and Mark Romanek on Never Let Me Go's existential questions

The star and director talk Japanese cinema, the dangers of praise and the challenges of bringing Kazuo Ishiguro's bestselling novel to the screen:

This Thing of Darkness by Harry Thompson

Longlisted for the Man Booker Prize

'Perhaps the best historical novel I have read…A stunning achievement of imagination and story-telling. A masterpiece.' Bernard Cornwell

'It's an excellent read, in the traditions of Patrick O'Brian, and fully deserves its position on the Booker list.'

The Daily Telegraph

In 1831 Charles Darwin set off in HMS Beagle under the command of Captain Robert Fitzroy on a voyage that would change the world. 

In novels by Kurt Vonnegut, we find the concept of a "karass": a small group of people whom fate brings together to accomplish great things.

The suicide of a British captain in 1828 and the need to replace him in charting the icy complexities of Tierra Del Fuego led to the appointment of Fitzroy as commander of the Beagle. His manic-depressive state led him to advertise for a ship's naturalist, a companion to jolly him from dark moods - and to appoint Charles Darwin. Of such contingencies are revolutions made, whether or not they might have happened otherwise.

This is an epic novel of sea-faring adventure set in the 19th century charting the life of Fitzroy, the captain of 'The Beagle' and his passenger Charles Darwin.

It combines adventure, emotion, ideas, humour and tragedy as well as illuminating the history of the 19th century. Fitzroy, the Christian Tory aristocrat believed in the sanctity of the individual, but his beliefs destroyed his career and he committed suicide. Darwin, the liberal minor cleric doubts the truth of the Bible and develops his theory of evolution which is brutal and unforgiving in human terms. The two friends became bitter enemies as Darwin destroyed everything Fitzroy stood for.

This Thing of Darkness is two sorts of book: a superior adventure story and a polemic. One can enjoy the former considerably while noting that the manners of the latter are wanting. The Independent

About the Author

Harry Thompson was a highly successful television producer 'Have I Got News for You, They Think It's All Over, Never Mind the Buzzcocks' and the author of a number of non-fiction bestsellers 'Peter Cook, The Biography'. He wrote for most of the national newspapers, especially on travel, and was nominated for Travel Journalist of the Year. He died in November 2005.

Click here to read an interview with the author from The Guardian conducted a few months before he died...

Arthur and George by Julian Barnes

Shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize

'The situation at the centre of this richly accomplished new novel isn’t fantasy but fact. Taking a real-life Edwardian whodunit Barnes transforms it into a dazzling exercise in detective fiction of more kinds than one.' The Times

Arthur and George grow up worlds and miles apart in late nineteenth-century Britain: Arthur in shabby-genteel Edinburgh, George in the vicarage of a small Staffordshire village.

Arthur becomes a doctor, and then a writer; George a solicitor in Birmingham.

Arthur is to become one of the most famous men of his age, George remains in hardworking obscurity.

But as the new century begins, they are brought together by a sequence of events which made sensational headlines at the time as The Great Wyrley Outrages.

With a mixture of detailed research and vivid imagination, Julian Barnes brings to life not just this long-forgotten case, but the inner workings of these two very different men.

This is a novel in which the events of a hundred years ago constantly set off contemporary echoes, a novel about low crime and high spirituality, guilt and innocence, identity, nationality and race.

Most of all it is a profound and moving meditation on the fateful difference between what we believe, what we know and what we can prove.

The Guardian reviews Julian Barnes's wonderfully executed Arthur & George which recounts Conan Doyle's own detective adventure

Read more about the book at the Author's own website...

About the Author

Julian Barnes was born in Leicester, England on January 19, 1946. He was educated at the City of London School from 1957 to 1964 and at Magdalen College, Oxford, from which he graduated in modern languages (with honors) in 1968. After graduation, he worked as a lexicographer for the Oxford English Dictionary supplement for three years. In 1977, Barnes began working as a reviewer and literary editor for the New Statesmen and the New Review. From 1979 to 1986 he worked as a television critic, first for the New Statesmen and then for the Observer.

Barnes has received several awards and honors for his writing including the Somerset Maugham Award (Metroland 1981), three Booker Prize nominations (incl. Flaubert's Parrot 1984, England, England 1998); Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize (FP 1985); Prix Médicis (FP 1986); E. M. Forster Award (American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters, 1986); Gutenberg Prize (1987); Grinzane Cavour Prize (Italy, 1988); and the Prix Femina (Talking It Over 1992). Barnes was made a Chevalier de l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres in 1988, Officier de l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres in 1995 and Commandeur de l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres in 2004. In 1993 he was awarded the Shakespeare Prize by the FVS Foundation and in 2004 won the Austrian State Prize for European Literature.

Julian Barnes has written numerous novels, short stories, and essays. He has also translated a book by French author Alphonse Daudet and a collection of German cartoons by Volker Kriegel. His writing has earned him considerable respect as an author who deals with the themes of history, reality, truth and love.

Read an interview with the author explaining why he came to write about the creator of Sherlock Holmes...