Through one sleepless night, I read this. An intensely intimate, spare and gripping novel about the asylum at Craiglockhart in Edinburgh, where soldiers suffering shellshock and other psychological problems were sent during the First World War. Here, they meet Dr Rivers, an anthropologist and psychiatrist, who tries to help them cope with the trauma of the trenches, and ultimately make them appear sane enough that they can credibly sent back there. Among these patients are Siegfried Sassoon and Wilfred Owen, who will go on to become celebrated poets. As I have studied their poetry and visited the grounds of Craiglockhart, the world Barker described felt very tangible to me, but it is her skill of writing dialogue that captures the humanity of a person and the things unsaid that makes this book so compelling. In a few words, she makes her characters utterly vivid. Normally, I would avoid the subject of WW1, but had heard so many good things about this book that I decided to try reading it: and I'm glad that I did. Barker doesn't tell me anything I haven't read before about WW1, and trauma is certainly a subject I'm familiar with, but in her portrait of the patients and their doctor, who is growing more and more frayed himself, she evokes a depth of compassion. There are many dilemmas for Dr Rivers, particularly whether it is right to send men back to the Front, and many ethical problems for the reader. This novel seems to prove that witnessing atrocity has its own power: that sitting with someone and listening and letting them be seen and heard gives them back something that atrocity has taken from them. This is not a very hopeful book, but there is solace in the descriptions of slow healing and of the ways in people can find ways to communicate with one another.