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The follow-up to Pat Barker's Number One bestseller THE WOMEN OF TROYContinuing the story of the captured Trojan women as they set sail for Mycenae with the victorious Greeks, this new novel centres on the fate of Cassandra -- daughter of King Priam, priestess of Apollo, and a prophet condemned never to be heeded. (When she refuses to have sex with Apollo, after he has kissed her, granting her the gift of true prophecy, he spits in her mouth to make sure she will never be believed.)Psychologically complex and dangerously driven, Cassandra's arrival in Mycenae will set in motion a bloody train of events, drawing in King Agamemnon, his wife Clytemnestra and daughter Electra. Agamemnon's triumphant return from Troy is far from the celebration he imagined, and the fate of the Trojan women as uncertain as they had feared.

Troy has fallen. The Greeks have won their bitter war. They can return home as victors - all they need is a good wind to lift their sails. But the wind has vanished, the seas becalmed by vengeful gods, and so the warriors remain in limbo - camped in the shadow of the city they destroyed, kept company by the women they stole from it. The women of Troy. Helen - poor Helen. All that beauty, all that grace - and she was just a mouldy old bone for feral dogs to fight over. Cassandra, who has learned not to be too attached to her own prophecies. They have only ever been believed when she can get a man to deliver them. Stubborn Amina, with her gaze still fixed on the ruined towers of Troy, determined to avenge the slaughter of her king. Hecuba, howling and clawing her cheeks on the silent shore, as if she could make her cries heard in the gloomy halls of Hades. As if she could wake the dead. And Briseis, carrying her future in her womb: the unborn child of the dead hero Achilles. Once again caught up in the disputes of violent men. Once again faced with the chance to shape history. Masterful and enduringly resonant, ambitious and intimate, The Women of Troy continues Pat Barker's extraordinary retelling of one of our greatest classical myths, following on from the critically acclaimed The Silence of the Girls.

The great city of Troy is under siege as Greek heroes Achilles and Agamemnon wage bloody war over a stolen woman. In the Greek camp, another woman is watching and waiting- Briseis. She was a queen of this land until Achilles sacked her city and murdered her husband and sons. Now she is Achilles' concubine- a prize of battle. Briseis is just one among thousands of women backstage in this war - the slaves and prostitutes, the nurses, the women who lay out the dead - all of them voiceless in history. But, though no one knows it yet, they are just ten weeks away from the death of Achilles and the Fall of Troy, an end to this long and bitter conflict. Briseis will see it all - and she will bear witness.

Paul Tarrant, Elinor Brooke and Kit Neville first met in 1914 at the Slade School of Art, before their generation lost hope, faith and much else besides on the battlefields of Ypres and the Somme. Now it is 1940, they are middle-aged, and another war has begun. London is a haunted city. Some have even turned to seances in an attempt to contact lost loved ones. As the bombs fall and Elinor and the others struggle to survive, old temptations and obsessions return, and all of them are forced to make choices about what they really want ...

Toby has always protected his sister, Elinor, their bond closer than they can acknowledge. Then comes war, and in 1917 on a French battlefield Toby is reported 'Missing, Believed Killed'. Elinor, an artist now involved in helping surgeons reconstruct the faces of injured soldiers, is determined to find out what happened and writes to the horrifically wounded Kit Neville, the last man to see Toby alive. But Neville is in hospital, himself damaged beyond recognition, and he will not talk - until Elinor asks fellow soldier and her former lover Paul Tarrant for help. But are some truths better left concealed? 'Magnificent; I finished it eagerly, wanting to know what happened next, and as I read, I was enjoying, marvelling and learning.' Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, author of Half of a Yellow Sun 'A heart-rending return to the Great War. A superb stylist . . . forensically observant and imaginatively sublime.' Independent 'Once again Barker skilfully moves between past and present, seamlessly weaving fact and fiction into a gripping narrative.' Sunday Telegraph 'Strong, truthful and beautifully controlled. Magnificent.' Saga 'Dark, painful, yet also tender. It succeeds brilliantly.' John Vernon, New York Times 'Raw, visceral . . . A fiercely honest account of the effects of war.' Daily Express 'The plot unfurls to a devastating conclusion . . . a very fine piece of work.' Melvyn Bragg, New Statesman Books of the Year

In the Spring of 1914 a group of students at the Slade School of Art have gathered for a life-drawing class. Paul Tarrant is easily distracted by an intriguing fellow student, Elinor Brooke, but when Kit Neville � himself not long out of the Slade but already a well-known painter � makes it clear that he, too, is attracted to Elinor, Paul withdraws into a passionate affair with an artist�s model. As spring turns to summer, Paul and Elinor each reach a crisis in their relationships until finally, in the first few days of war, they turn to each other. Paul�s new life as a volunteer for the Belgian Red Cross is a world away from his days at the Slade. The longer he remains in Ypres, the greater the distance between himself and home becomes, and by the time he returns, Paul must confront the fact that life, and love, will never be the same again.

When Tom Seymour, a child psychologist, plunges into the water to save a man from drowning he opens a chapter from his past. The drowning man was Danny Miller, who Tom helped imprison for killing an old woman as a ten-year-old boy.

Returning to Afghanistan after his photographer friend is killed by a sniper, war reporter Stephen Sharkey seeks release from his nightmares in an England seemingly at peace with itself.

Union Street , Pat Barker's first novel, concerns seven neighboring women near a factory in northeast England. Life for these women is some of them are married to alcoholics, some are victims of abuse; one is old and near death, another is still a child but has the experience of an adult; all are struggling to survive. First published in 1982, it was made into the film Stanley & Iris by MGM in 1989, starring Robert DeNiro and Jane FondaBlow Your House Down , Barker's second novel, also portrays the lives of women in industrial England--but these women are prostitutes, living in a northern England city that is stalked by a vicious, Jack the Ripper-style serial killer who is singling out women with nowhere else to go.

The Booker Prize-winning modern classic of contemporary war fiction from the Women's Prize-shortlisted author of The Silence of the Girls Recommended by Richard Osman 'One of the few real masterpieces of late twentieth-century British fiction' Jonathan Coe 'Original, delicate and unforgettable' Independent 'A new vision of what the First World War did to human beings, male and female, soldiers and civilians. Constantly surprising and formally superb' A. S. Byatt, Daily Telegraph 1917, Scotland. At Craiglockhart War Hospital in Scotland, army psychiatrist William Rivers treats shell-shocked soldiers before sending them back to the front. In his care are poets Siegfried Sassoon and Wilfred Owen, and Billy Prior, who is only able to communicate by means of pencil and paper. . . Regeneration, The Eye in the Door and The Ghost Road follow the stories of these men until the last months of the war. Widely acclaimed and admired, Pat Barker's Regeneration trilogy paints with moving detail the far-reaching consequences of a conflict which decimated a generation. The Regeneration trilogy: Regeneration The Eye in the Door The Ghost Road