Toby's Room
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4.2 • 26 Ratings
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- £3.99
Publisher Description
From the Booker Prize-winning and Women's Prize-shortlisted author of The Silence of the Girls
The second novel in Pat Barker's acclaimed 'Life Class' trilogy - a dark and compelling examination of desire, friendship and the horror of war, from one of our greatest writers on war and the human heart
'Heart-rending... Toby's Room anatomises a world where extreme emotion shatters the boundaries of identity, behaviour, gender' Independent
'Once again Barker skilfully moves between past and present, seamlessly weaving fact and fiction into a gripping narrative' Sunday Telegraph
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.
The Life Class trilogy:
Life Class
Toby's Room
Noonday
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Fans of Barker's Regeneration trilogy know she has a gift for combining real and imagined characters, for making you see the horrors of war, and for knowing that people don't stop having sex or being themselves because there's a war on. This story, which revisits the characters of Barker's last novel, Life Class, and is also set before and during WWI, features some of these traits, but, alas, without the fierce immediacy that made the trilogy so memorable. The titular Toby is painter Elinor Brooke's brother; they're close, problematically so; when news comes that he's "missing, believed dead," the need to know what happened takes over Elinor. In time, it reconnects her to Kit Neville, part of Toby's team of medics, and Paul Tarrant, soldiers and war artists who were her fellow students, and, in Paul's case, her former lover. Part mystery, part exploration of the varieties and vagaries of love and grief, part a description of British efforts to devise prosthetics and document the worst injuries, the book covers a lot of ground perhaps too much. Readers may not feel the same urgency that Elinor does, and the eventual solution to the mystery, coming as it does amid all the other themes, doesn't pack the necessary punch.
Customer Reviews
TOBY
Not as successful as Regeneration or The Ghost Road, but it remains a gripping, if uncomfortable, novel about the effects of morality, war and the after image they leave on familial relationships. The interconnectedness between Toby and Elinor was difficult to get through. Barker's stark, often blunt, prose completely suits the subject matter.
Toby's room
Brilliant read. Incredibly well observed and beautifully written. Not always comfortable but thought provoking and gripping.