Barker’s Regeneration Trilogy has earned reams of praise over the years, but Samuel Hynes might have said it best when reviewing the first volume, Regeneration, for the New York Times: “[Literary] fashions change, theories emerge and fade, but the realistic writer goes on believing that plain writing, energized by the named things of the world, can make imagined places actual and open other lives to the responsive reader, and that by living those lives through words a reader might be changed. Pat Barker must believe that, or she wouldn’t write as she does.” If not mightier than the savage sword that inflicted the wounds of World War I, the pen, in Barker’s hand, bears powerful witness to the scars it left behind.