Another World
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About the Author

Pat Barker was born in 1943. She is the author of Union Street, Blow your House Down, The Century's Daughter, The Man Who Wasn't There, the Regeneration Trilogy (Regeneration, The Eye in the Door and The Ghost Road), Another World, Border Crossing, Double Vision, and the Life Class Trilogy (Life Class, Toby's Room and Noonday). Pat Barker lives in Durham.

Reviews

""Another World" demonstrates the extraordinary immediacy and vigor of expression we have come to expect from Barker . . . A powerful and moving and deeply humane study of the tyranny of the past and the quandaries of the present."--Barry Unsworth, "The New York Times Book Review"
"[Pat Barker] is the natural successor to George Orwell, like him a keen and passionate defender of humiliated children, foot soldiers and what's become of the British working class."--"Newsday"
"One of Pat Barker's gifts is her mix of compassion and bleak realism . . . Barker's confidence as a stripped-down, elegant stylist is evenly matched by her moral depth.""--""The Boston Sunday Globe"
"Barker is capable of getting across a powerful message with the absolute minimum of rhetoric, one of the rarest gifts a writer can be blessed with. The surface simplicity of her method conceals, then slowly reveals, a narrative with all the richness and complexity of a symphony."--"The New Criterion"
"Thi

""Another World demonstrates the extraordinary immediacy and vigor of expression we have come to expect from Barker . . . A powerful and moving and deeply humane study of the tyranny of the past and the quandaries of the present."--Barry Unsworth, "The New York Times Book Review
"[Pat Barker] is the natural successor to George Orwell, like him a keen and passionate defender of humiliated children, foot soldiers and what's become of the British working class."--"Newsday
"One of Pat Barker's gifts is her mix of compassion and bleak realism . . . Barker's confidence as a stripped-down, elegant stylist is evenly matched by her moral depth.""--"The Boston Sunday Globe
"Barker is capable of getting across a powerful message with the absolute minimum of rhetoric, one of the rarest gifts a writer can be blessed with. The surface simplicity of her method conceals, then slowly reveals, a narrative with all the richness and complexity of a symphony."--"The New Criterion
"This old-fashioned novel in a modern idiom remains one of the best things she has ever done, surely the most moving." --Ruth Rendell, author of" Harm Done
"A remarkable novel, stark but human at the center." --"The Sunday Star-Ledger
"[Barker's] remarkable visits to the past help replenish the emptying containers of memory by substituting storytelling for forgetting. With her novels, she adds dignity to this century's often bleak and undignified human record." --"The Los Angeles Times Book Review
"Barker's writing is brilliant; the thoughtful, inventively composed sentences are a joy to read."
--"The Austin American Statesman

The author of the award-winning Regeneration trilogy has changed publishers and time frames for her newest book, but the result is as spellbinding as ever: thoughtful, acutely observed and profoundly moving. Geordie, a WWI veteran, is over 100, but is hanging on to life with the same stubbornness and iconoclasm that have seen him through the entire 20th century. His grandson, Nick, living in grim, contemporary Newcastle-on-Tyne, is struggling with his own life as he monitors Geordie's last days. Nick's teenage daughter from a previous marriage, Miranda, has come to stay; his new wife, Fran, with her own kid, Gareth, a computer games freak, has two-year-old Jasper to contend with and another baby on the way. Now it seems that their new house may be haunted by the kind of malign domestic spirit at large among Nick's little family. Geordie, too, has his own ghostsÄa hideous war memory, long buried, that must be exorcised before he can die in peace. Barker mixes brilliantly observed contemporary realism (the strains of family life with children of different ages have seldom been so powerfully rendered) and mystical overtones with dazzling skill. The book has the grip of a superior thriller while introducing, with no sense of strain, a sense of sorrowful mortality that lingers long after the last page. Geordie is a masterly creation, one of the most fully realized characters in contemporary fiction. (May) FYI: A film of Regeneration, starring Jonathan Pryce, was recently released in the U.S.

In the impressive `Regeneration' trilogy, Barker evoked a sense of the turmoil in the lives of shell-shocked World War One soldiers. In Another World, she portrays, with equal deftness, the lives of the members of a desperately unblended modern family: Nick; his partner, Fran; Nick's daughter; Fran's son; and Nick and Fran's son. There is a realistic minefield of unhappy relationships and conflicting demands for each character to negotiate. But this utterly contemporary novel is also a serious meditation on the past and its relationship with the present. Barker's preoccupation with World War One manifests again: Nick's 101-year-old grandfather Geordie is a veteran, and as he approaches death, he is thrust back into the past by hallucinatory memories. The links between present and past are also brought to the fore by the traces of the first occupants of Nick and Fran's newly acquired house, which is innocuously described as `a family home', but hides a grotesque family portrait under its wallpaper. There are secrets to discover about this other family - hidden violence that threatens Nick and Fran's family too. But despite powerful hatred, there is also powerful love, and a sense of regeneration at the end. This complex novel is near flawless, and makes compulsive reading. Lorien Kaye is an editorial assistant at D W Thorpe. C. 1998 Thorpe-Bowker and contributors

""Another World" demonstrates the extraordinary immediacy and vigor of expression we have come to expect from Barker . . . A powerful and moving and deeply humane study of the tyranny of the past and the quandaries of the present."--Barry Unsworth, "The New York Times Book Review"
"[Pat Barker] is the natural successor to George Orwell, like him a keen and passionate defender of humiliated children, foot soldiers and what's become of the British working class."--"Newsday"
"One of Pat Barker's gifts is her mix of compassion and bleak realism . . . Barker's confidence as a stripped-down, elegant stylist is evenly matched by her moral depth.""--""The Boston Sunday Globe"
"Barker is capable of getting across a powerful message with the absolute minimum of rhetoric, one of the rarest gifts a writer can be blessed with. The surface simplicity of her method conceals, then slowly reveals, a narrative with all the richness and complexity of a symphony."--"The New Criterion"
"Thi
""Another World demonstrates the extraordinary immediacy and vigor of expression we have come to expect from Barker . . . A powerful and moving and deeply humane study of the tyranny of the past and the quandaries of the present."--Barry Unsworth, "The New York Times Book Review
"[Pat Barker] is the natural successor to George Orwell, like him a keen and passionate defender of humiliated children, foot soldiers and what's become of the British working class."--"Newsday
"One of Pat Barker's gifts is her mix of compassion and bleak realism . . . Barker's confidence as a stripped-down, elegant stylist is evenly matched by her moral depth.""--"The Boston Sunday Globe
"Barker is capable of getting across a powerful message with the absolute minimum of rhetoric, one of the rarest gifts a writer can be blessed with. The surface simplicity of her method conceals, then slowly reveals, a narrative with all the richness and complexity of a symphony."--"The New Criterion
"This old-fashioned novel in a modern idiom remains one of the best things she has ever done, surely the most moving." --Ruth Rendell, author of" Harm Done
"A remarkable novel, stark but human at the center." --"The Sunday Star-Ledger
"[Barker's] remarkable visits to the past help replenish the emptying containers of memory by substituting storytelling for forgetting. With her novels, she adds dignity to this century's often bleak and undignified human record." --"The Los Angeles Times Book Review
"Barker's writing is brilliant; the thoughtful, inventively composed sentences are a joy to read."
--"The Austin American Statesman

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