Pat Barker. (2012). Toby's Room. Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group.

Pat Barker. 2012. Toby's Room. Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group.

Pat Barker, Toby's Room. Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, 2012.

Pat Barker. Toby's Room. Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, 2012.

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13. • value: contemporary fiction
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19. • value: Military
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30. • value: orphans
31. • value: Family Saga
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33. • value: literature
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1. • role: Author
   • fileAs: Barker, Pat
   • bioText: Pat Barker is the author of numerous novels, including Noonday, Toby's Room, and Life Class, as well as the highly acclaimed Regeneration Trilogy: Regeneration; The Eye in the Door, winner of the Guardian Fiction Prize; and The Ghost Road, winner of the Booker Prize. She lives in the north of England.
   • name: Pat Barker

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2012-10-02T00:00:00-04:00

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title

Toby's Room

fullDescription

From Booker Prize winner Pat Barker, a masterful novel that portrays the staggering human cost of the Great War. Admirers of her Regeneration Trilogy as well as fans of Downton Abbey and War Horse will be enthralled.

With Toby’s Room, a sequel to her widely praised previous novel Life Class, the incomparable Pat Barker confirms her place in the pantheon of Britain’s finest novelists. This indelible portrait of a family torn apart by war focuses on Toby Brooke, a medical student, and his younger sister Elinor. Enmeshed in a web of complicated family relationships, Elinor and Toby are close: some might say too close. But when World War I begins, Toby is posted to the front as a medical officer while Elinor stays in London to continue her fine art studies at the Slade, under the tutelage of Professor Henry Tonks. There, in a startling development based in actual fact, Elinor finds that her drafting skills are deployed to aid in the literal reconstruction of those maimed in combat.
One day in 1917, Elinor has a sudden premonition that Toby will not return from France. Three weeks later the family receives a telegram informing them that Toby is “Missing, Believed Killed” in Ypres. However, there is no body, and Elinor refuses to accept the official explanation. Then she finds a letter hidden in the lining of Toby’s uniform; Toby knew he wasn’t coming back, and he implies that fellow soldier Kit Neville will know why.

Toby’s Room is an eloquent literary narrative of hardship and resilience, love and betrayal, and anguish and redemption. In unflinching yet elegant prose, Pat Barker captures the enormity of the war’s impact—not only on soldiers at the front but on the loved ones they leave behind.

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reviews

1. • premium: False
   • source: The New York Times Book Review
   • content:

     "Unforgettable. . . . Toby's Room takes large risks . . . and it succeeds brilliantly."

2. • premium: False
   • source: The Toronto Star
   • content: "Breathtakingly good. . . . Barker has written extensively about the Great War . . . yet she's still coming at it in fresh, powerful ways. This is a writer truly at the height of her powers, and it's a dizzying height indeed."
3. • premium: False
   • source: The Independent (London)
   • content: "Barker has shown again that she is not only a fine chronicler of war but of human nature."
4. • premium: False
   • source: The Wall Street Journal
   • content: "Haunting and complicated sibling love is at the heart of [this] novel. . . . The precision of Ms. Barker's writing shows her again to be one of the finest chroniclers of . . . the First World War."
5. • premium: False
   • source: The Daily Beast
   • content: "Gripping and majestic."
6. • premium: False
   • source: The New York Times Book Review
   • content: "Toby's Room takes large risks. It's dark, painful and indelibly grotesque, yet it's also tender. It strains against its own narrative control to create, in the midst of ordinary life, a kind of deformed reality--precisely to illustrate how everything we call 'ordinary' is disfigured by war. And it succeeds brilliantly."
7. • premium: False
   • source: The Washington Post
   • content: "Barker is peerless at evoking the atmosphere of the trenches and of wartime London."
8. • premium: False
   • source: The Guardian (London)
   • content: "Unsparing and rigorous. . . . For Barker, the wounded faces of the soldier-victims are realities, and also emblems of what must never be forgotten or evaded about war, and must continue--in her plain, steady, compelling voice--to be turned into art."
9. • premium: False
   • source: The Philadelphia Inquirer
   • content: "Barker's writing is subtle and nuanced, even as it is unsentimental in showing the physical and emotional effects of the war. Her mixture of sensitivity and bluntness made her Regeneration trilogy of the 1990s a remarkable work."
10. • premium: False
    • source: San Francisco Chronicle
    • content: "This is a powerful book. . . . Barker triumphs."
11. • premium: False
    • source: Corinna Lothar, The Washington Times
    • content: "Excellent. . . . Truly gripping. . . . Miss Barker's prose shines. . . . Will there be a sequel? I hope so."
12. • premium: False
    • source: The Miami Herald
    • content: "No one evokes England in all its stiff-upper-lip gritty wartime privation like Barker. She is . . . determined to render an honest portrayal of war. She will not allow us to sweep it out of sight."
13. • premium: False
    • source: The Plain Dealer
    • content: "Difficult to put down. . . . Barker is so deft handling history, from battlefield scenes to surgery in Queen's Hospital, that she has few peers."
14. • premium: True
    • source:
    • content:

      August 6, 2012
      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. Agent: Gillon Aitken, Aitken Alexander Associates.

15. • premium: True
    • source:
    • content:

      September 15, 2012
      Booker Prize winner Barker revisits some students at the Slade art school in the years before and after their experiences in Life Class (2008). Part One, set in 1912, explains one reason why Elinor Brooke is the Slade's edgiest student; on a visit to her wealthy parents' country home, she has an incestuous one-night stand with her brother, Toby. Elinor flings herself into a dissection class at London Hospital, hoping to elevate her life-drawing skills to the exacting standards of Slade professor Henry Tonks. She also becomes close friends with arrogant, ambitious Kit Neville and meets new Slade student Paul Tarrant just before Part Two sweeps us ahead to 1917, in the thick of World War I. Toby is missing, believed killed; Paul and Kit have both been wounded, Kit with facial injuries that take him to Queen's Hospital, where Tonks makes portraits of the disfigured men to assist the medical staff. "How can any human being endure this?" Elinor wonders as she looks at this work. It's a rare moment of compassion for Elinor, who has hardened noticeably in the five-year interval and is obsessed with finding out what happened to Toby. A note among his belongings sent home from the front suggests that Kit knows something, and Elinor enlists her erstwhile lover Paul--whom she's barely visited since he was wounded--to confront Kit in the hospital. Kit refuses to tell them anything, but the sordid truth about Toby's fate does eventually come out. War's horrors are a familiar subject for Barker, and she has always been a trenchant, uncompromising writer, but this sour work is far below the best pages of Life Class, let alone the majestic pessimism of her masterpiece, the Regeneration trilogy (Regeneration, 1992, etc.). Here, she seems to be exploring with diminishing returns themes that once displayed her gifts more fully. A rare disappointment from one of England's finest writers.

      COPYRIGHT(2012) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

16. • premium: True
    • source:
    • content:

      May 1, 2012
      

      Booker Award winner Barker's new World War I trilogy concerns a group of friends who meet at London's Slade School of Art and move on through life--straight into the war. In this second volume (after Life Class), Toby is reported missing and believed killed, and sister Elinor tries to discover what happened. Life Class seemed a weak start to the trilogy; perhaps as we move past backstory to the real tragedy of the fighting, Barker will show her spirit.

      Copyright 2012 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

17. • premium: True
    • source:
    • content:

      August 1, 2012
      Barker is firmly established in the realm of historical fiction due to her much-celebrated Regeneration Trilogy about Britain during WWI (Regeneration, 1991; The Eye in the Door, 1994; The Ghost Road, 1995). Although her latest novel is not in a trilogy, it does share with her recent Life Class (2008) a London art-academy setting. Again, it's wartime. The carnage in Flanders fields is graphically brought to the home front in the ravagedliterallyfaces of returned soldiers. Art student Elinor Brooke's relationship with her brother, Toby, goes beyond usually accepted norms. When Toby is killed in battle, Elinor is obsessed with learning the details of his death. This obsession leads her on a long physical and mental journey, with the reader following along in rapt attention. As always, Barker constructs easily consumed sentences, each contributing to the sturdy, compelling story line, and although Elinor's obsession could have easily grown wearying, Barker's sympathetic treatment prevents the reader from reaching that point. HIGH-DEMAND BACKSTORY: Publicity and marketing strategies are commensurate with the high regard Barker holds among serious fiction readers, especially fans of historical novels.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2012, American Library Association.)

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From Booker Prize winner Pat Barker, a masterful novel that portrays the staggering human cost of the Great War. Admirers of her Regeneration Trilogy as well as fans of Downton Abbey and War Horse will be enthralled.

With Toby’s Room, a sequel to her widely praised previous novel Life Class, the incomparable Pat Barker confirms her place in the pantheon of Britain’s finest novelists. This indelible portrait of a family torn apart by war focuses on Toby Brooke, a medical student, and his younger sister Elinor. Enmeshed in a web of complicated family relationships, Elinor and Toby are close: some might say too close. But when World War I begins, Toby is posted to the front as a medical officer while Elinor stays in London to continue her fine art studies at the Slade, under the tutelage of Professor Henry Tonks. There, in a startling development based in actual fact, Elinor finds that her drafting skills are...

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