Pat Barker is a nearly pure novelist: she writes no short stories, no poetry, but, beginning with her first novel, Union Street (1982), immediately declared herself as a major novelist. In the following year she appeared on Granta's list of the "Twenty Best British Novelists," alongside more widely recognized names such as those of Martin Amis, Salman Rushdie, and Julian Barnes. Slightly older than they, she was always aiming to be a writer but found her voice only when, after some false starts, she found her subject matter, which, at least at first, was the lives of working-class people, particularly women, living in northeastern England. Later she staked out another territory: World War I, about which she has written three powerful novels known as the Regeneration Trilogy. The third of these, The Ghost Road, won the Booker Prize for fiction in 1995.

Her novels about working-class women often include fatherless...