In the closing months of World War I, psychiatrist William Rivers treats the mental casualties of the war, making them whole enough to return to battle. As Dr. Rivers treats his patients, he begins to see the parallels between the culture of death in the tribes of the South Seas, where he served as a young missionary doctor, and in Europe in the grips of World War |. At the same time, Billy Prior, one of Dr. Rivers’s patients, returns to France, where millions of men engaged in brutal trench warfare are all “ghosts in the making,” to fight a war he no longer believes in.

Combining poetic intensity with gritty realism, Pat Barker both encapsulates history and transcends it in this modern masterpiece.