ABSTRACT
In terms of levels of critical acclaim and of book sales, Pat Barker's career has been divided rather sharply in two. Her early novels, published in the 1980s, drew on her knowledge of the past and present of her native Teesside to present portraits of lives bravely created out of unpromising circumstances of poverty and deprivation. Pat Barker was born in the small industrial town of Thornaby-on-Tees in 1943. She studied international history at the London School of Economics and went on to teach in further education colleges. Barker's first novel after completing the Regeneration trilogy, Another World, is not a historical novel but the First World War lives on in one of its characters. Her second novel, Blow Your House Down, is probably the strongest of these early books—the story of a Northern city in which a series of killings of prostitutes creates an overwhelming atmosphere of tension and fear.
