Regeneration

In 1917 the decorated poet Siegfried Sassoon is sent to Craiglockhart War Hospital after issuing A Soldier’s Declaration against the continuation of the war. Rather than court-martial him, the army classifies his protest as evidence of mental illness and places him under the care of W. H. R. Rivers. Rivers must decide whether a sane moral objection can be treated as a symptom while working with officers suffering mutism, paralysis, nightmares and traumatic memory, including the fictional Billy Prior.

At Craiglockhart, Sassoon meets Wilfred Owen and helps the younger poet revise work that will become central to British war poetry. Robert Graves, Arthur John Brock and other historical figures share the narrative with invented patients and civilians, while Rivers’s humane methods are contrasted with Lewis Yealland’s coercive electrical treatment of enlisted men. The novel follows each patient towards a medical board and asks what recovery means when the institution’s purpose is to make traumatised soldiers fit to return to the Western Front.