Another World Book

Award-winning author of The Regeneration Trilogy, Pat Barker has established her reputation as one of the most powerful and versatile novelists writing today. Her eighth novel, Another World, sustains and extends her scope, telling a powerful and complex tale of family, memory, illness and war. Haunted by memories of the First World War, Geordie is dying of cancer; haunted by the violence of families past (and present) his grandson Nick 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--Peter Sutcliffe, Cromwell Street, "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 LebeauRead More