The Eye in the Door

Set in London in 1918, ‘The Eye in the Door’ is an intense and profoundly intelligent examination of the effects of war, continuing the interwoven stories of Dr William Rivers, Billy Prior, and Siegfried Sassoon begun in ‘Regeneration’. ‘The Eye in the Door’ was awarded the 1993 Guardian Fiction Prize, while the final volume in the ‘Regeneration’ trilogy, ‘The Ghost Road’, won the Booker Prize in 1995. Writing in the Sunday Times, Peter Kemp said, ‘In the climate of exhaustion and hysteria amid which the war is wearing to its close, pressures to fall into line become fierce and take ugly forms. At the forefront of her story, Barker places figures especially menaced by this: pacifists, conscientious objectors and homosexuals … a sequel every bit as unwaveringly intense and intelligent as its predecessor’.