Product Description

Nick's grandfather Geordie lies dying. As Nick watches, Geordie starts to relive the horrors surrounding his brother's death and his own terrible experiences during the First World War. Meanwhile, Nick and his wife Fran are trying to unite their increasingly fractious young family, despite the discovery of an obscene Victorian drawing which reveals the tragic history of their house and casts a terrifying shadow over the family.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #207433 in Books
• Published on: 1999-07-01
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 288 pages

Amazon.co.uk 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

About the Author
Pat Barker was born in 1943 and educated at LSE. She has published several novels including her highly acclaimed REGENERATION TRILOGY. THE EYE IN THE DOOR was winner of the 1993 Guardian Fiction Prize, and THE GHOST ROAD, winner of the 1995 Booker Prize for Fiction. Pat Barker is married and lives in Durham.

Customer Reviews

Brilliant
This is simply stunning; for the first time in ages I forgot where I was reading this book, I was completely hooked and couldn't stop reading well into the early hours of the next day. The writing is breathtaking. I would recommend this book to anyone, just to be left with the same feeling I had by the time I'd finished the book. More please!

A vivid and powerful depiction of the tyranny of memory.
Barker might have entitled this novel Still Another World, so many overlapping worlds does she present here. On the surface it is the story of Nick and the complex life he now shares with his second wife and new son, his ex-wife and daughter, and his strange stepson. It is the story, too, of the Fanshawe family, a much earlier, and also troubled, family that once inhabited the house Nick is now restoring.

But it is especially the story of Geordie, Nick's 101-year-old grandfather and the worlds he has known, including the world of war. Although Nick learned as a child that "You had to be two people, one in each world [of family and of school]," he has always believed that his grandfather "never changed; belonged to only one world." Now that Geordie is dying, however, Nick learns of Geordie's other worlds: his family life, his difficulties after World War I, his marriage, his war nightmares, the haunting death of his brother in battle, and his mother's comment that the wrong son died. And we see the tyranny of memory as Geordie relives his brother Harry's dying moments. Geordie himself says, "I know that what I remember seeing is false. It can't have been like that, and so the one thing I need to remember clearly, I can't ....It's as clear as this hand...only it's wrong."

These vividly depicted battles, real and symbolic, all raise questions of responsibility and blame as each character assesses the accuracy of his own memory. Even the supernatural is evoked, peripherally, as characters consider whether they have really seen what they think they have seen. As Nick gains knowledge through his time spent with Geordie, he recalls their visit to the "ageless graves" of Thiepval, which keep perpetually alive the traumas of a terrible war, and he recognizes the contrast to the graves of the tiny churchyard in which Geordie will lie, with names hidden by moss, old mourners dead and forgotten, and gently decaying stones. And he and the reader recognize that "there's wisdom too in this."

Barker's tightly constructed plots and themes, her vividly drawn characters, her evocation of atmosphere, her deft use of settings to enhance the drama, and her ability to communicate new visions, all testify to the brilliance of this novel, one which may, itself, escape the erosions of time and its "obliterating grass."

Not quite up to "Regeneration" - but a damned good read.
Pat Barker's "Regeneration" trilogy were very fine works - which helped set the events of the Great War in a new light.

This novel however, is more of a potboiler - it's almost as if she's decided to enter Stephen King territory, albeit strictly on her own terms.

Yet she gives us plenty to ponder while we're flicking the pages.

Her unflinching use of modern day, real-life nightmares, with which we are all uneasily familiar (such the fuzzy CCTV images of two schoolboys leading away a toddler)gives this work a chilly resonance.

It's quite good on the details of modern-day Newcastle, too!