Ghost Road

Student Text Guide

by Pat Barker

In the closing months of World War I, Dr. William Rivers is treating shell-shocked soldiers at Craiglockhart Hospital, only to send them back to the trenches to be slaughtered. Among these men are Billy Pryor, an officer originally from the working class, who returns to the front with his friend, the poet Wilfrid Owen. Meanwhile, Rivers himself becomes ill with influenza during the epidemic and returns in memory to a South Pacific tribe he once studied, seeing connections between those days and the present time, with its senseless battles and meaningless, blind patriotism. Winner of the Booker Prize in 1995.

Editions of Ghost Road

ISBN 9780452276727	Binding/Format Paperback	Publisher Plume	Date 1996	Price $2.35	Very Good
ISBN 9780340965757	Binding/Format Paperback	Publisher Hodder Education	Date 2009	Price None Available
ISBN 9780525941910	Binding/Format Hardcover	Publisher Penguin USA	Date 1995	Price $1.00	Used, Very Good
ISBN 9780670854899	Binding/Format Book	Publisher Viking	Date 1995	Price £1.00	Very Good
ISBN 9781568953809	Binding/Format Hardcover	Publisher Wheeler Pub Inc	Date 1996	Price None Available
ISBN 9780745127668	Binding/Format Audio Cassette	Publisher Chivers Audio Books	Date 1996	Price None Available

Publisher Notes

Dr. William Rivers at the Craiglockhart War Hospital faces the moral dilemma of curing men like Lieutenant Billy Prior of shellshock so that they can return to the fighting.

Media Reviews

"While Ms. Barker is meticulously true to both the military and personal aspects of her history, she is never constrained by her sources. REGENERATION (published here in 1991), THE EYE IN THE DOOR (1993) and now THE GHOST ROAD are too imaginatively free-ranging and immediate to seem quite 'historical novels,' too concerned with moral and sexual battles to seem quite 'war novels,' too striking as hybrids of fact and possibility, easy humor and passionate social argument to be classified as anything but the masterwork to date of a singular and ever-evolving novelist who has consistently made up her own rules."

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