Pat Barker Books in Order

In 1970s northeastern England, seven working class women living on the same street face poverty, violence, and factory closures. Linked stories trace their lives from childhood to old age, showing how friendship, stubborn humour, and anger help them endure a changing industrial town.

In a grim northern city, a group of prostitutes work the streets while a serial killer stalks their clients. As fear grows, the women cling to one another and confront the danger that has made their already precarious lives almost unbearable.

In her eighties and threatened with eviction, Liza Jarrett tells her life story to Stephen, a young social worker. From a harsh Edwardian childhood through wars and the Thatcher years, their conversations sketch a century of working class struggle, family loyalty, and quiet rebellion.

In the 1950s, twelve year old Colin knows almost nothing about his absent father and fills the gap with film fueled fantasies of wartime heroism. As he pushes his mother for answers, the stories he invents collide with the secrets she is trying to protect.

Set in 1917 at Craiglockhart War Hospital, Regeneration follows army psychiatrist W. H. R. Rivers as he treats poet Siegfried Sassoon, fictional officer Billy Prior, and other shell shocked soldiers. Their sessions probe the cost of healing men only to send them back to war.

In 1918 London, officer Billy Prior is seconded to domestic intelligence, ordered to hunt down pacifists and gay men while he still struggles with his own shell shock. His investigations expose a climate of paranoia that reaches into every private life.

As the First World War nears its end, Billy Prior returns to the trenches in France while Dr. Rivers, ill at home, remembers an earlier field trip to a South Pacific island. Their intertwined stories explore how cultures, and individuals, learn to live with death.

Nick, a teacher in Newcastle, is juggling a fragile blended family and the care of his grandfather Geordie, a centenarian haunted by memories of the Somme. A disturbing history hidden in their new house blurs the line between past and present wounds.

When psychologist Tom Seymour pulls a young man from a river, he recognises him as Danny Miller, the child he once helped send to prison for murder. Their uneasy renewed contact forces Tom to question memory, responsibility, and whether someone like Danny can ever truly change.

War reporter Stephen Sharkey retreats to a remote cottage to recover from years covering conflicts and from a broken marriage. Drawn into the lives of sculptor Kate Frobisher, her unsettling assistant Peter, and the vicar's teenage daughter, he learns that violence is not confined to distant battlefields.

This short volume, taken from Regeneration, follows two key encounters at Craiglockhart War Hospital: the first meetings between poets Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon, and the hesitant, tender romance that grows between shell shocked officer Billy Prior and munitions worker Sarah Lumb.

On the eve of the First World War, art students at the Slade School, including Paul Tarrant, Elinor Brooke, and Kit Neville, fall in and out of love in London studios. When Paul volunteers at a frontline hospital, war forces them to rethink what art is for.

Elinor Brooke cannot accept the official story of her brother Toby's death at the front. Returning to former lovers and fellow artists Paul Tarrant and Kit Neville, she digs into wartime secrets while drawing the shattered faces of soldiers in a pioneering reconstructive surgery ward.

During the London Blitz, Elinor Brooke and Kit Neville drive ambulances through burning streets while Paul Tarrant serves as an air raid warden. As bombs fall night after night, old jealousies, affairs, and half-buried griefs flare up in the glow of the fires.

Queen turned captive Briseis is seized when Achilles sacks her city and becomes his slave in the Greek camp outside Troy. Speaking from the crowded women's quarters, she recounts the famous war as a story of survival, rape, and fragile alliances among the conquered.

After Troy has fallen, pregnant Briseis and the other captured women wait in a Greek camp for the winds to change so the army can sail home. An unburied king, an unstable young warrior, and growing female alliances all test how far survival will bend their loyalties.

After the fall of Troy, prophetess Cassandra and her enslaved attendant Ritsa sail with Agamemnon back to Mycenae, where his wife Clytemnestra waits. Trapped between visions of future bloodshed and the need to survive day by day, the women navigate a ship and a palace steeped in old violence.