Reviews
Praise for Toby's Room : "[T]he writing is lucid and often beautiful."-Thom Geier, Entertainment Weekly "You get a glimpse inside Toby's room in Pat Barker's poignant novel of the same name, but what you remember are three real and very different English landmarks - the Slade, London's prestigious art academy; Cafe Royal, frequented by the likes of Oscar Wilde, Winston Churchill and Virginia Woolf; and the Queen's Hospital, opened in 1917 to serve injured British soldiers in need of facial reconstruction.... No one evokes England in all its stiff-upper-lip gritty wartime privation like Barker. She is as uncompromising as Henry Tonks, as determined to render an honest portrayal of war. She will not allow us to sweep it out of sight.... [She] sets the bar high."-Ellen Kanner, Miami Herald "Haunting and complicated sibling love is at the heart of Pat Barker's Great War novel .... [T]he precision of Ms. Barker's writing shows her again to be one of the finest chroniclers of both the physical and psychological disfigurements exacted by the First World War."- Wall Street Journal "[A]lthough Toby's Room is not billed as a prequel or sequel to Life Class and the reader need not be familiar with that novel in order to get to grips with this... [t]hose who do know Barker's previous work will be struck by recurrences and continuations in this novel not only of events in Life Class , but in Regeneration , too.... [Barker's] prose remains fresh, humanely business-like, crisp and unsentimental. Images are scrupulously vivid, and the plot has real momentum."-Freya Johnston, Telegraph (London) "A driving storyline and a clear eye, steadily facing the history of our world.... For Barker, the wounded faces of the soldier-victims are realities, and also emblems of what must never be forgotten or evaded about war, and must continue in her plain, steady, compelling voice to be turned into art."-Hermione Lee, Guardian (London) Praise for Life Class "Beautiful and evocative . . . A coming-of-age story that transcends the individual and gestures to the fate of a generation." - People " Life Class possesses organic power and narrative sweep . . . Barker conjures up the hellish terrors of war and its fallout with meticulous precision." -Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times "Here, as in her best fiction, Barker unveils psychologically rich characters . . . and resists the trappings of a neat love story, reminding us once again that in art and life we remain infinitely mysterious." - San Francisco Chronicle Praise for the Regeneration Trilogy "A masterwork . . . complex and ambitious." - The New York Times Book Review "It has been Pat Barker's accomplishment to enlarge the scope of the contemporary English novel." - The New Yorker "A literary achievement . . . remarkable." - San Francisco Chronicle "Some of the most powerful antiwar writing in modern fiction." - The Boston Globe, Praise for Life Class "Beautiful and evocative . . . A coming-of-age story that transcends the individual and gestures to the fate of a generation." - People " Life Class possesses organic power and narrative sweep . . . Barker conjures up the hellish terrors of war and its fallout with meticulous precision." -Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times "Here, as in her best fiction, Barker unveils psychologically rich characters . . . and resists the trappings of a neat love story, reminding us once again that in art and life we remain infinitely mysterious." - San Francisco Chronicle Praise for the Regeneration Trilogy "A masterwork . . . complex and ambitious." - The New York Times Book Review "It has been Pat Barker's accomplishment to enlarge the scope of the contemporary English novel." - The New Yorker "A literary achievement . . . remarkable." - San Francisco Chronicle "Some of the most powerful antiwar writing in modern fiction." - The Boston Globe, Advance Praise for Toby's Room : "[A]lthough Toby's Room is not billed as a prequel or sequel to Life Class and the reader need not be familiar with that novel in order to get to grips with this... [t]hose who do know Barker's previous work will be struck by recurrences and continuations in this novel not only of events in Life Class , but in Regeneration , too.... [Barker's] prose remains fresh, humanely business-like, crisp and unsentimental. Images are scrupulously vivid, and the plot has real momentum."-Freya Johnston, Telegraph (London) "A driving storyline and a clear eye, steadily facing the history of our world.... For Barker, the wounded faces of the soldier-victims are realities, and also emblems of what must never be forgotten or evaded about war, and must continue in her plain, steady, compelling voice to be turned into art."-Hermione Lee, Guardian (London) Praise for Life Class "Beautiful and evocative . . . A coming-of-age story that transcends the individual and gestures to the fate of a generation." - People " Life Class possesses organic power and narrative sweep . . . Barker conjures up the hellish terrors of war and its fallout with meticulous precision." -Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times "Here, as in her best fiction, Barker unveils psychologically rich characters . . . and resists the trappings of a neat love story, reminding us once again that in art and life we remain infinitely mysterious." - San Francisco Chronicle Praise for the Regeneration Trilogy "A masterwork . . . complex and ambitious." - The New York Times Book Review "It has been Pat Barker's accomplishment to enlarge the scope of the contemporary English novel." - The New Yorker "A literary achievement . . . remarkable." - San Francisco Chronicle "Some of the most powerful antiwar writing in modern fiction." - The Boston Globe