THE MAN WHO WASN'T THERE

By Pat Barker

Synopsis

Twelve-year-old Colin knows little about his father except that he must have fought in the war. His mother says nothing about him, so Colin turns to films for images of what his father might have been. Weaving in and out of Colin's real life, his imagined film explores issues of loyalty and betrayal and searches for the answer to the question 'What is a man?' Some of the words in this book may give offence.

Sample Player

Narrator	George Griffin
Length	4hrs
Catalogue No.	615581
Publisher	Virago Press

Other audiobooks by Pat Barker

ANOTHER WORLD (X Rated)

Nick's grandfather, Geordie, is dying and remembers long buried secrets. At the same time Nick and his wife Fran begin to learn terrifying things about the past of their new home, Lobs Hill. X rated, contains offensive language.

BORDER CROSSING

When Tom Seymour, a child psychologist, plunges into a river to save a young man from drowning, he unwittingly reopens a chapter from his past he'd hoped to forget. For Tom already knows Danny Miller. When Danny was ten Tom helped imprison him for the killing of an old woman. Now out of prison with a new identity, Danny has some questions - questions he thinks only Tom can answer. Reluctantly, Tom is drawn back into Danny's world - a place where the border between good and evil, innocence and guilt is blurred and confused. But when Danny's demands on Tom become extreme, Tom wonders whether he has crossed a line of his own - and in crossing it, can he ever go back?

DOUBLE VISION

Returning to Afghanistan after his photographer friend is killed by a sniper, war reporter Stephen Sharkey seeks release from his nightmares in an England seemingly at peace with itself. Questioning man's inhumanity to man both abroad and at home, and whether love really can be the great redeemer, Double Vision is a searing novel of conflict in modern times.

THE EYE IN THE DOOR

London, 1918. Billy Prior is working for Intelligence in the Ministry of Munitions. But his private encounters with women and men - pacifists, objectors, homosexuals - conflict with his duties as a soldier, and it is not long before his sense of himself fragments and breaks down. Forced to consult the man who helped him before - army psychiatrist William Rivers - Prior must confront his inability to be the dutiful soldier his superiors wish him to be. The Eye in the Door is a heart-rending study of the contradictions of war and of those forced to live through it.

THE GHOST ROAD

1918, the closing months of the war. Army psychiatrist William Rivers is increasingly concerned for the men who have been in his care - particularly Billy Prior, who is about to return to combat in France with young poet Wilfred Owen. As Rivers tries to make sense of what, if anything, he has done to help these injured men, Prior and Owen await the final battles in a war that has decimated a generation. The Ghost Road is a vivid and unforgettable account of the devastating final months of the First World War.

LIFE CLASS

When war breaks out in 1914, Paul Tarrant, a student at the Slade School of Art, leaves behind his attempted life as an artist and his beautiful fellow-student Elinor to tend to casualties on the front line.

LIZA'S ENGLAND

Liza Jarrett, born at the dawn of the twentieth century, is now in her eighties, frail and facing eviction. When she is visited by Stephen, a young gay social worker, she recalls her life, and their friendship, deepening with the unfolding of their stories, comes to sustain Liza through her last battle and brings new courage to Stephen.

REGENERATION

Craiglockhart War Hospital, Scotland, 1917, and army psychiatrist William Rivers is treating shell-shocked soldiers. Under his care are the poets Siegfried Sassoon and Wilfred Owen, as well as mute Billy Prior, who is only able to communicate by means of pencil and paper. Rivers's job is to make the men in his charge healthy enough to fight. Yet the closer he gets to mending his patients' minds the harder becomes every decision to send them back to the horrors of the front. Pat Barker's Regeneration is the classic exploration of how the traumas of war brutalised a generation of young men.

THE SILENCE OF THE GIRLS

There was a woman at the heart of the Trojan war whose voice has been silent - till now. Briseis was a queen until her city was destroyed. Now she is slave to Achilles, the man who butchered her husband and brothers. Trapped in a world defined by men, can she survive to become the author of her own story?

TOBY'S ROOM

When Toby is reported 'Missing, Believed Killed', another secret casts a lengthening shadow over Elinor's world: how exactly did Toby die - and why? Elinor determines to uncover the truth. Only then can she finally close the door to Toby's room.

UNION STREET (X Rated)

All the women of Union Street deal with poverty and survival in a precarious world, from eleven year old Kelly coping with rape to old Alice looking forward to death. X rated, explicit sexual content.

THE WOMEN OF TROY

Troy has fallen. The Greeks have won their bitter war. They can return home as victors - all they need is a good wind to lift their sails. But the wind has vanished, the seas becalmed by vengeful gods, and so the warriors remain in limbo - camped in the shadow of the city they destroyed, kept company by the women they stole from it. The women of Troy. Helen - poor Helen. All that beauty, all that grace - and she was just a mouldy old bone for feral dogs to fight over. Cassandra, who has learned not to be too attached to her own prophecies. They have only ever been believed when she can get a man to deliver them. Stubborn Amina, with her gaze still fixed on the ruined towers of Troy, determined to avenge the slaughter of her king. Hecuba, howling and clawing her cheeks on the silent shore, as if she could make her cries heard in the gloomy halls of Hades. As if she could wake the dead. And Briseis, carrying her future in her womb: the unborn child of the dead hero Achilles. Once again caught up in the disputes of violent men. Once again faced with the chance to shape history.