The Ghost Road

In the closing months of 1918, Billy Prior is passed fit and returns to France with Wilfred Owen as the Allied armies begin their final advance. Prior records the mud, exhaustion, sex, fear and fatalism of men who know that the war may be ending but must continue to attack. Their path leads into the fighting of 4 November near the Sambre–Oise Canal, where Owen was historically killed one week before the Armistice and where Barker brings Prior’s fictional military career to its conclusion.

In England, W. H. R. Rivers continues treating wounded officers while reconsidering the purpose and limits of his work. His memories return to the 1908 Percy Sladen Trust expedition with Arthur Maurice Hocart in the Solomon Islands, where he observed healing, ritual, colonial disruption and population loss. By placing Melanesian fieldwork beside the final battles of industrial Europe, the novel closes the trilogy through parallel studies of damaged communities, medical authority, sacrifice and the ways societies make meaning from death.