The ghost road

The final months of the First World War are under way. In France, millions of men are caught in trench warfare. In England, the psychologist William Rivers treats soldiers broken by the fighting, knowing his work is meant to make them fit to return to it. His conscience troubles him badly.

One of his patients is Billy Prior, a courageous and sardonic officer who has risen from the working class. Prior no longer believes in the war, yet he decides to go back to France alongside a fellow officer, the poet Wilfred Owen.

Rivers, meanwhile, falls ill with influenza. In his fever he returns in memory to his time studying a tribe in the South Pacific, whose way of life centred on death. Setting that society beside his own, he starts to draw connections that change how he understands war.

This is historical fiction, the third and last volume of the Regeneration Trilogy, and it won the 1995 Booker Prize. It moves between the front and Rivers's memories, mixing gritty realism with dark humour and tragic drama. The tone is sombre, and the story heads toward an ending that feels inevitable.