The Ghost Road

The Ghost Road is a war novel by the English writer Pat Barker, published in 1995. It won the Booker Prize, and it is the third volume of a trilogy whose earlier books are Regeneration and The Eye in the Door.

The trilogy follows shell-shocked British officers towards the end of the First World War and mixes real people with invented ones. The war poet Siegfried Sassoon is a major figure in the first book and a minor one here, where the novel belongs to the psychoanalyst William Rivers and to the fictional working-class officer Billy Prior.

Prior has been treated for shell shock, is engaged to a munitions worker named Sarah, and has been passed fit to return to France. He is not much concerned about his own safety, and the novel follows his last weeks in England and the risky sexual encounters he has in them, alongside Rivers's work with his patients and his memories of the peoples he studied before the war. The book closes the trilogy's account of what the war did to the men who fought in it.