Пэт Баркер – лучшие книги

Мировая история обычно рассказывается мужчинами - и всегда с их точки зрения. Ведь творили ее именно они - мужчины, герои и титаны духа. И почти никто не вспоминает, что рожали и воспитывали этих титанов обычные женщины, а свои подвиги все герои совершали в основном ради них, или из-за них, или во имя них. Но и страдали от мужских деяний в основном тоже они… Когда греческая царица Елена была захвачена троянцами и увезена из Спарты, под стены Трои приплыло несметное греческое войско. Долгие годы осаждали они город, разоряя его окрестности. Брисеида тоже была царицей. Теперь она - рабыня и наложница Ахилла, великого героя, вырезавшего всю…

Craiglockhart War Hospital, Scotland, 1917, where army psychiatrist William Rivers is treating shell-shocked soldiers. Under his care are the poets Siegfried Sassoon and Wilfred Owen, as well as mute Billy Prior, who is only able to communicate by means of pencil and paper. Rivers's job is to make the men in his charge healthy enough to fight. Yet the closer he gets to mending his patients' minds the harder becomes every decision to send them back to the horrors of the front...

Regeneration is the classic exploration of how the traumas of war brutalised a generation of young men.

1918, the closing months of the war. Army psychiatrist William Rivers is increasingly concerned for the men who have been in his care - particularly Billy Prior, who is about to return to combat in France with young poet Wilfred Owen. As Rivers tries to make sense of what, if anything, he has done to help these injured men, Prior and Owen await the final battles in a war that has decimated a generation ...

In "Toby's Room", Pat Barker revisits the First World War and the characters introduced in Life Class.
When Toby is reported "Missing, Believed Killed", another secret casts a lengthening shadow over Elinor's world: how exactly did Toby die - and why? Elinor determines to uncover the truth. Only then can she finally close the door to Toby's room. Moving from the Slade School of Art to Queen Mary's Hospital, where surgery and art intersect in the rebuilding of the shattered faces of the wounded, "Toby's Room" is a riveting drama of identity, damage, intimacy and loss. "Toby's Room" is Pat Barker's most powerful novel yet.

It is the spring of 1918, and Britain is faced with the possibility of defeat by Germany. A belaguered government and a vengeful public target two group as scapegoats: pacifists and homosexuals. Many are jailed, others lead dangerous double lives, the "the eye in the door" becomes a symbol of the paranoia that threatens to destroy the very fabric of British society. Central to this novel are such compelling, richly imagined characters as the brilliant and compassionalte Dr. William Rivers; his most famous patient, the poet Siegfried Sassoon; and Lieutenant Billy Prior, who plays a central rold as a domestic intelligence agent. The Eye in…

Following her bestselling, critically acclaimed The Silence of the Girls, Pat Barker continues her extraordinary retelling of one of our greatest myths. Troy has fallen. The Greeks have won their bitter war. They can return home victors, loaded with their spoils: their stolen gold, stolen weapons, stolen women. All they need is a good wind to lift their sails. But the wind does not come. The gods have been offended - the body of Priam lies desecrated, unburied - and so the victors remain in limbo, camped in the shadow of the city they destroyed, pacing at the edge of an unobliging sea. And, in these empty, restless days, the…

At 101 years old, Geordie, a proud Somme veteran, lingers painfully through the days before his death. His grandson Nick is anguished to see this once-resilient man haunted by the ghosts of the trenches and the horror surrounding his brother's death. But in Nick's family home the dark pressures of the past also encroach on the present. As he and his wife Fran try to unite their uneasy family of step- and half-siblings, the discovery of a sinister Victorian drawing reveals the murderous history of their house and casts a violent shadow on their lives...

Afterwards, it was the horses she remembered, galloping towards them out of the orange-streaked darkness, their manes and tails on fire...'

London, the Blitz, autumn 1940. As the bombs fall on the blacked-out city, ambulance driver Elinor Brooke races from bomb sites to hospitals trying to save the lives of injured survivors, working alongside former friend Kit Neville, while her husband Paul works as an air-raid warden.

Once fellow students at the Slade School of Fine Art, before the First World War destroyed the hopes of their generation, they now find themselves caught in another war, this time at home. As the bombing intensifies, the constant risk of death makes all three of them reach out for quick consolation. Old loves and obsessions re-surface until Elinor is brought face to face with an almost impossible choice.

In Pat Barker's The Man Who Wasn't There, twelve-year-old Colin knows little about his father except that he must have fought in the war. His mother, totally absorbed by the nightclub where she works, says nothing about him, and Colin turns to films for images of what his father might have been. Weaving in and out of Colin's real life, his imagined film explores issues of loyalty and betrayal and searches for the answer to the question 'What is a man?'

A new, fully updated edition of David Attenborough’s groundbreaking Life on Earth.David Attenborough’s unforgettable meeting with gorillas became an iconic moment for millions of television viewers. Life on Earth, the series and accompanying book, fundamentally changed the way we view and interact with the natural world setting a new benchmark of quality, influencing a generation of nature lovers.Told through an examination of animal and plant life, this is an astonishing celebration of the evolution of life on earth, with a cast of characters drawn from the whole range of organisms that have ever lived on this planet. Attenborough’s perceptive, dynamic approach to the evolution of millions of species of living organisms takes the reader on an unforgettable journey of discovery from the very first spark of life to the blue and green wonder we know today.To celebrate the 40th anniversary of the book’s first publication, David Attenborough revisited Life on Earth, completely updating and adding to the original text, taking account of modern scientific discoveries from around the globe. This paperback edition also includes more than 60 full colour photographs, chosen by the author to help illustrate the book in a much greater way than was possible forty years ago.This updated edition provides a fitting tribute to an enduring wildlife classic, destined to enthral the generation who saw it when first published and bring it alive for a whole new generation.

Border Crossing is Pat Barker's unflinching novel of darkness, evil and society. When Tom Seymour, a child psychologist, plunges into a river to save a young man from drowning, he unwittingly reopens a chapter from his past he'd hoped to forget. For Tom already knows Danny Miller. When Danny was ten Tom helped imprison him for the killing of an old woman. Now out of prison with a new identity, Danny has some questions - questions he thinks only Tom can answer. Reluctantly, Tom is drawn back into Danny's world - a place where the border between good and evil, innocence and guilt is blurred and confused. But when Danny's demands on Tim become extreme, Tom wonders whether he has crossed a line of his own - and in crossing it, can he ever go back? 'Brilliantly crafted. Unflinching yet sensitive, this is a dark story expertly told' Daily Mail 'A tremendous piece of writing, sad and terrifying. It keeps you reading, exhausted and blurry-eyed, until 2am' Independent on Sunday 'Resolutely unsensational but disquieting . . . Barker probes not only the mysteries of 'evil' but society's horrified and incoherent response to it' Guardian 'Rich, challenging, surprising, breathtaking' The Times

The follow-up to Pat Barker's Number One bestseller THE WOMEN OF TROY Continuing the story of the captured Trojan women as they set sail for Mycenae with the victorious Greeks, this new novel centres on the fate of Cassandra -- daughter of King Priam, priestess of Apollo, and a prophet condemned never to be heeded. (When she refuses to have sex with Apollo, after he has kissed her, granting her the gift of true prophecy, he spits in her mouth to make sure she will never be believed.) Psychologically complex and dangerously driven, Cassandra's arrival in Mycenae will set in motion a bloody train of events, drawing in King Agamemnon,…

Dauntless Liza Jarrett, born at the dawn of the twentieth century, is now in her eighties, frail and facing eviction with her cantankerous parrot Nelson, when she is visited by Stephen, a young gay social worker. As she learns to trust him, she recalls her life - her embittered, exhausted mother, her shell-shocked spiritualist husband, her beloved son and chaotic daugter. Their friendship, deepening with the unfolding of their stories, comes to sustain Liza through her last battle and brings new courage to Stephen.

Double Vision follows Kate, a sculptor whose photojournalist husband is killed in Afghanistan, and Stephen, a journalist who, after covering September 11 with Kate's husband and then being betrayed by his wife, has determined to retire to a small town and write a book about violence. When the two meet, the coincidence of their lives, one of which involves Kate's disturbing new studio assistant, and sinister events force Stephen to act instinctively, violently, and to face painful revelations about himself.

1917, Scotland. At Craiglockhart War Hospital in Scotland, army psychiatrist William Rivers treats shell-shocked soldiers before sending them back to the front. In his care are poets Siegfried Sassoon and Wilfred Owen, and Billy Prior, who is only able to communicate by means of pencil and paper. . .
Regeneration, The Eye in the Door and The Ghost Road follow the stories of these men until the last months of the war. Widely acclaimed and admired, Pat Barker's Regeneration trilogy paints with moving detail the far-reaching consequences of a conflict which decimated a generation.

Женщины с Юнион-стрит, молодые и пожилые, сталкиваются с суровыми испытаниями, пытаясь выжить в таком ненадежном и тревожном мире. Одиннадцатилетняя Келли, пережившая изнасилование; Дайна, которой стукнуло шестьдесят, но она все еще о-го-го; Джоанна, которой еще нет двадцати, уже беременная, хотя и не замужем; старая Элис, готовящаяся к приближающейся смерти; Мюриэл, беспомощно наблюдающая за угасанием своего непоколебимого мужа. А объединяет их всех, присматривает за ними, являясь матерью для половины улицы, упрямая Айрис.
Книга Пэт Баркер “Union Street” заинтересует тех читателей, кому по душе драматические произведения о сильных женщинах.
Книга на английском языке.
Vivid, bawdy and bitter' (The Times), Pat Barker's first novel shows the women of Union Street, young and old, meeting the harsh challeges of poverty and survival in a precarious world. There's Kelly, at eleven, neglected and independent, dealing with a squalid rape; Dinah, knocking on sixty and still on the game; Joanne, not yet twenty, not yet married, and already pregnant; Old Alice, welcoming her impending death; Muriel helplessly watching the decline of her stoical husband. And linking them all, watching over them all, mother to half the street, is fiery, indomitable Iris.

Written by the author of "Union Street", "The Century's Daughter" and "The Man Who Wasn't There", this is a story about a killer who is roaming the streets of a northern city, setting off a wave of terror.
A city and its people are in the grip of a killer who is roaming the northern city, singling out prostitutes. The face of his latest victim stares out from every newspaper and billboard, haunting the women who walk the streets. But life and work go on. Brenda, with three children, can't afford to give up while Audrey, now in her forties, desperately goes on 'working the cars'. And then, when another women is savagely murdered, Jean, her lover, takes desperate measures.

Pat Barker's Regeneration trilogy, published by Penguin between 1991 and 1995, and culminating in the Booker Prize-winning The Ghost Road, is widely considered to be the definitive modern statement on the brutality of war - and the First World War