Another World - Hardcover

Pat Barker

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0374105251 ISBN 13: 9780374105259

Publisher: Farrar Straus & Giroux, 1999

Synopsis

In a touching novel of memory and loss, Nick tries to keep the peace in his disintegrating family while comforting his grandfather, a proud, intelligent man who lies dying on the other side of town. By the author of Regeneration. Tour.

About this title

Review:

Award-winning author of The Regeneration Trilogy, Pat Barker has established her reputation as one of the most powerful and versatile novelists writing today. Her eighth novel, Another World, sustains and extends her scope, telling a powerful and complex tale of family, memory, illness and war. Haunted by memories of the First World War, Geordie is dying of cancer; haunted by the violence of families past (and present) his grandson Nick struggles with his thoroughly modern marriage: angry stepchildren, exhausting toddler, miserably pregnant wife. Wracked by guilt, Geordie relives his brother's death in the trenches, and his mother's grieving verdict: "It should have been you." Uncovering the intimate and public reach of Geordie's history, Nick is forced up against the "power of old wounds to leak into the present" and the paradoxical fragility--or pliancy--of personal memory. Weaving into her fictional worlds some of the most disturbing images of contemporary Britain--Peter Sutcliffe, Cromwell Street, "an older boy taking a toddler by the hand while his companion strides ahead, eager for the atrocity to come"--Barker draws her themes together into a remarkable, sometimes ruthless, study of family life and death. --Vicky Lebeau

Review:

""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"

About this edition

• Publisher: Farrar Straus & Giroux
• Publication date: 1999
• ISBN 10: 0374105251
• ISBN 13: 9780374105259
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 277