Regeneration

Regeneration is a historical novel by the English writer Pat Barker, first published in 1991. It was shortlisted for the Booker Prize and opens the Regeneration Trilogy.

The book is set during the First World War at Craiglockhart, the hospital near Edinburgh where officers suffering from what was then called shell shock were treated. Its central figures are drawn from real people: the army psychiatrist W. H. R. Rivers, the poet Siegfried Sassoon, who had published a statement against the war and was sent to the hospital rather than court-martialled, and Wilfred Owen, who was a patient at the same time. Barker's subject is the treatment itself, and the conflict between a doctor whose job is to make men fit for the trenches and his own understanding of what the war is doing to them. The novel uses the hospital, its staff and its patients rather than the battlefield, and the war is felt mostly through what the men cannot say about it.

The trilogy continues with The Eye in the Door and The Ghost Road, which won the Booker Prize in 1995.