• Title: The Ghost Road
• Author: Pat Barker
• Genre/Subject: Fiction (Booker Prize Winner 1995)
• Publisher: Penguin/Kindle
• Publication Date: 1995
• Start date: 11/4/2022
• Finish date: 11/9/2022

Review:

What an extraordinary book.

A tour de force from first to last.

Set in 1918 and with retrospectives to an earlier time prior to the war.

A gritty, even shockingly brutal look at life in 1918. Imagine all the old codgers you see at the cenotaph on November 11 being young and fucking each other in the ass. Humans and war have changed very little over the course of time, as evidenced by flashbacks throughout the novel to the protagonists time amongst the headhunter tribes in melanesia.

The brutality of trench warfare mixed in with episodes of surreal beauty in the French countryside.

Glorious in every detail. I now award the rare and coveted Neilosian 5 star rating.