Another World - Softcover

Barker, Pat

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0670877166 ISBN 13: 9780670877164

Publisher: Viking, 1998

Synopsis

Nick's grandfather Geordie lies dying. As Nick watches, Geordie starts to relive the horrors surrounding his brother's death in the painful days before his own. Meanwhile Nick and his wife Fran try to unite their increasingly fractious family by organizing the children into decorating the living room. Gradually, as the old wallpaper is peeled away an obscence portrait of an Edwardian family is revealed. The drawing is an exercise in hate, revealing the history of their house and casting a terrifying shadow over the family.

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: Viking
• Publication date: 1998
• ISBN 10: 0670877166
• ISBN 13: 9780670877164
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 288