Penguin Books Australia

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

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

'Pat Barker's novel is not only a vivid evocation of the agony of the First World War. It is a multi-layered exploration of all wars, challenging assumptions about the relationship between doctors and patients, between the classes, between men and women, and between men and men. A fine anthem for doomed youth.'   — Time Out

1918, 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...

Craiglockhart War Hospital, Scotland, 1917, where 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...

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...

Spring, 1914. The students at the Slade School of Art gather in Henry Tonks's 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 won't take Paul, he enlists in the Belgian Red Cross just as he and fellow student Elinor admit their feelings for one another. Amidst the devastation...

The third book in the Regeneration trilogy

1918, 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...

Reluctantly...