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Sign up todayLife Class
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Learn moreIn the spring of 1914, a group of young students gather in an art studio for a life-drawing class. Paul Tarrant and Elinor Brooke are two components of a love triangle, and at the outset of the war, they turn to each other. After volunteering for the Red Cross, Paul must confront the fact that life, love, and art will never be the same for him. Pat Barker is unrivaled in her ability to convey simple, moving human truths. Her skill in relaying the harrowing experience of modern warfare is matched by the depth of insight she brings to the experience of love and the morality of art in a time of war. Life Class is one of her genuine masterpieces.
Pat Barker was born in Yorkshire and began her literary career in her forties, when she took a short writing course taught by Angela Carter. Encouraged by Carter to continue writing and exploring the lives of working class women, she sent her fiction out to publishers. Thirty-five years later, she has published sixteen novels, including her masterful Regeneration Trilogy, been made a CBE for services to literature, and won awards including the Guardian Fiction Prize and the UK's highest literary honour, the Booker Prize. Her last novel, The Silence of the Girls, began the story of Briseis, the forgotten woman at the heart of one of the most famous war stories ever told. It was shortlisted for the Women's Prize for Fiction and the Gordon Burn Prize, and won an Independent Bookshop Award 2019. The Women of Troy continues that story. Pat Barker lives in Durham.
Russell Boulter is an English actor who has been seen on stage in Madness of George Dubya, Macbeth, and Star Quality, while his many television appearances include Judge John Deed, EastEnders, Murder in Suburbia, Merseybeat, A&E, Where the Heart Is, Casualty, The Bill, and Heartbeat.
Reviews
“Beautiful and vocative...A coming-of-age story that transcends the individual and gestures to the fate of a generation.”
“Barker’s grim, gray depiction of the hospital at the front, and of ghastliness of combat, approaches her finest writing, elegant and sweeping…She is the best English novelist working today.”
“Written with wrenching, telling detail…Life Class feels urgent and timely.”
“Mature, unsentimental and searching. One of this excellent writer’s finest books.”
“The author’s unflinching eye for detail and her supple prose create an undeniably powerful narrative.”
“Readers…will appreciate the care she takes in her rich, deliberate character building.”
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