Which Pat Barker novel won the 1995 Booker Prize?

The Ghost Road won the 1995 Booker Prize for Pat Barker.

The novel is the third volume of Barker’s Regeneration Trilogy, which follows shell-shocked British officers and the doctors treating them during the First World War. Its central fictional character, Billy Prior, returns to the front while the real-life psychiatrist William Rivers continues dealing with the psychological damage caused by combat.

Barker combines documented historical figures, including the poet Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon, with fictional characters. That blend lets the novel examine both the public machinery of war and the private costs of trauma, masculinity and class. The story moves between the Western Front and Rivers’s memories of an earlier anthropological expedition in the Solomon Islands.

The title can mislead readers who remember the earlier books: Regeneration and The Eye in the Door are also Barker novels about the same wartime world, but neither won the Booker. The Ghost Road completed the trilogy and took the prize in 1995.