The Eye in the Door was the richly deserving winner of the 1993 Guardian Fiction Prize, the second volume in Pat Barker's brilliant Regeneration Trilogy.

Written with immense power, it is the story not just of one young man suffering from the trauma of war, but from a generation, condemned to the unending slaughter of the trenches, and all the charged agony of class and gender that had its own bitter harvest.

But for all the pain she portrays, Barker's novel, with its wry humour and exquisite observation, explodes with life.