Regeneration
At Craiglockhart war hospital, an army psychiatrist treats shell-shocked officers — among them the poets Sassoon and Owen.
The Verdict
Pat Barker found a way into the First World War that almost no one had tried: from inside the psychiatric hospital where the army sent its broken officers to be mended and returned to the front. Regeneration sets the real military psychiatrist W. H. R. Rivers against his most famous patient, the protesting poet Siegfried Sassoon, and asks an unbearable question — what does it mean to heal a man only so he can be sent back to die? Spare, intelligent, and humane, it opened a trilogy that would win the Booker Prize.
Who Should Read It
Read it if you want
- Shell shock and the ethics of healing
- Sassoon and Rivers as fictional characters
- The war's psychological wounds
- The start of a Booker-winning trilogy
Look elsewhere if you want
- Front-line combat
- A conventional war narrative
- Only documented fact
Why We Rated It 4.5
Historical Context
Regeneration (1991) is set largely at Craiglockhart War Hospital in 1917 and draws on real figures — the psychiatrist W. H. R. Rivers and the poets Siegfried Sassoon and Wilfred Owen. It is the first novel of Barker's Regeneration Trilogy, which concluded with The Ghost Road, winner of the 1995 Booker Prize.
Events Covered
Editions & Reading Notes
Read It Alongside
Where to Buy
ISBN: 978-0452270077
Read This Against
The same events seen from a different vantage point. The fullest understanding often lives in the space between accounts that don't agree.
Other Books About the Same Events
Frequently Asked Questions
- Are the characters in Regeneration real?
- Several are — notably the psychiatrist W. H. R. Rivers and the poets Sassoon and Owen — woven together with fictional patients.
- Do I need to read the whole trilogy?
- Regeneration stands alone, but it begins a trilogy that ends with the Booker-winning The Ghost Road.