From Booker Prize winner Pat Barker, a masterful novel that portrays the staggering human cost of the Great War. Admirers of her Regeneration Trilogy as well as fans of Downton Abbey and War Horse will be enthralled.
With Toby's Room, a sequel to her widely praised previous novel Life Class, the incomparable Pat Barker confirms her place in the pantheon of Britain's finest novelists. This indelible portrait of a family torn apart by war focuses on Toby Brooke, a medical student, and his younger sister Elinor. Enmeshed in a web of complicated family relationships, Elinor and Toby are close: some might say too close. But when World War I begins, Toby is posted to the front as a medical officer while Elinor stays in London to continue her fine art studies at the Slade, under the tutelage of Professor Henry Tonks. There, in a startling development based in actual fact, Elinor finds that her drafting skills are deployed to aid in the literal reconstruction of those maimed in combat.
One day in 1917, Elinor has a sudden premonition that Toby will not return from France. Three weeks later the family receives a telegram informing them that Toby is "Missing, Believed Killed" in Ypres. However, there is no body, and Elinor refuses to accept the official explanation. Then she finds a letter hidden in the lining of Toby's uniform; Toby knew he wasn't coming back, and he implies that fellow soldier Kit Neville will know why.
Toby's Room is an eloquent literary narrative of hardship and resilience, love and betrayal, and anguish and redemption. In unflinching yet elegant prose, Pat Barker captures the enormity of the war's impact-not only on soldiers at the front but on the loved ones they leave behind.
Industry Reviews
"Unforgettable. . . . Toby's Room takes large risks . . . and it succeeds brilliantly." --The New York Times Book Review
"Breathtakingly good. . . . Barker has written extensively about the Great War . . . yet she's still coming at it in fresh, powerful ways. This is a writer truly at the height of her powers, and it's a dizzying height indeed." --The Toronto Star
"Barker has shown again that she is not only a fine chronicler of war but of human nature." --The Independent (London)
"Haunting and complicated sibling love is at the heart of [this] novel. . . . The precision of Ms. Barker's writing shows her again to be one of the finest chroniclers of . . . the First World War." --The Wall Street Journal
"Gripping and majestic." --The Daily Beast
"Toby's Room takes large risks. It's dark, painful and indelibly grotesque, yet it's also tender. It strains against its own narrative control to create, in the midst of ordinary life, a kind of deformed reality--precisely to illustrate how everything we call 'ordinary' is disfigured by war. And it succeeds brilliantly." --The New York Times Book Review
"Toby's Room is the most emotionally powerful and aesthetically daring of her searing about the First World War and British culture." --The Times Literary Supplement (London)
"An enthralling and uplifting read. Ms. Barker's fans will hope that, as with the Regeneration trilogy, a third installment is to follow." --The Economist
"Barker is peerless at evoking the atmosphere of the trenches and of wartime London." --The Washington Post
"Unsparing and rigorous. . . . 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." --The Guardian (London)
"Barker's writing is subtle and nuanced, even as it is unsentimental in showing the physical and emotional effects of the war. Her mixture of sensitivity and bluntness made her Regeneration trilogy of the 1990s a remarkable work." --The Philadelphia Inquirer
"This is a powerful book. . . . Barker triumphs." --San Francisco Chronicle
"Excellent. . . . Truly gripping. . . . Miss Barker's prose shines. . . . Will there be a sequel? I hope so." --Corinna Lothar, The Washington Times
"No one evokes England in all its stiff-upper-lip gritty wartime privation like Barker. She is . . . determined to render an honest portrayal of war. She will not allow us to sweep it out of sight." --The Miami Herald
"Difficult to put down. . . . Barker is so deft handling history, from battlefield scenes to surgery in Queen's Hospital, that she has few peers." --The Plain Dealer
