Insomnia, exhaustion, recurring nightmares Stephen Sharkey is suffering the aftereffects of his career as a war reporter, most recently in Afghanistan, where Ben Frobisher, war photographer and friend, has been shot dead on assignment. Hanging up his flak jacket and turning his back on the everyday reality of war, Stephen moves into a quiet and peaceful cottage in the north of England. It seems the perfect environment in which to write his book on the representations of war one that will be based largely on Ben Frobisher's work. But Stephen's supposed isolation offers no protection from other people's suffering or the shattering effects of human brutality ...

Pat Barker (born May 8 1943) is an English writer and historian. She published her first novel, Union Street, in 1982 and has since won critical acclaim for her First World War series, the Regeneration trilogy, a fictionalised account of the wartime experiences of the poets Siegfried Sassoon and Wilfred Owen, the psychiatrist W. H. R. Rivers, and the fictional protagonist, Lt. Billy Prior. The final book in the trilogy, The Ghost Road, won the Booker Prize upon its publication.

In 1965 Barker completed a degree in international history at the London School of Economics and subsequently studied at Durham University marrying David Barker, a now retired Zoology Professor at the institution. Barker's biographer is Sharon Montieth.