The Ghost Road

Summary

Closing the Regeneration trilogy, the novel moves between the army psychiatrist W. H. R. Rivers, his patient Billy Prior preparing to return to the Western Front, and Rivers's earlier anthropological work in Melanesia. Barker juxtaposes the rituals of headhunting societies with those of industrial warfare to ask uncomfortable questions about violence, masculinity and the cultures that sanction killing. Her clear, unsparing prose has made the book a touchstone of First World War fiction.