Regeneration Trilogy

The Regeneration Trilogy follows soldiers, doctors, poets and civilians during the final two years of the First World War. Its central relationship is between the neurologist and army psychiatrist W. H. R. Rivers and the fictional working-class officer Billy Prior, while Siegfried Sassoon, Wilfred Owen, Robert Graves and other historical figures enter a narrative that moves from Craiglockhart War Hospital to wartime London and the Western Front. The books examine shell shock, military medicine, poetry, sexuality, class and political dissent.

Across the trilogy, treatment is never separated from the army’s need to return men to duty. Regeneration centres on Sassoon’s protest and the psychiatric hospital at Craiglockhart; The Eye in the Door turns to intelligence work, surveillance and scapegoating on the British home front; and The Ghost Road carries Prior and Owen into the final campaigns of 1918 while Rivers remembers his earlier anthropological work in Melanesia. The sequence combines documented events and historical people with invented lives to show how war reshapes conscience, identity and memory.