Inner lives

The Battlefield Is Only One Place a War Continues

Pat Barker’s novel moves the First World War beyond the battlefield and into hospitals, damaged minds, psychiatric knowledge, and literary witness. Its wager is that combat cannot be understood by military narrative alone.

The Ghost Road by Pat Barker

In a Family Argument, Dialogue Is the Chain of Command

The early descriptions of Gwendoline Riley’s The Palm House pair abrasive relatives with exceptional dialogue. That combination points to a harder truth about family conflict: power often resides not in what people feel, but in the conversational roles they have learned to enforce.

The Palm House by Gwendoline Riley