Some of the best ghost stories barely have anything to do with the supernatural. Henry James' The Turn Of The Screw and Shirley Jackson's The Haunting Of Hill House are just two enduring classics that rely more on psychological implication than actual phantom manifestations. The ghosts Pat Barker writes about are even more metaphorical and mental: Her award-winning Regeneration trilogy explored the traces of horrible memories lingering in the scarred minds of WWI veterans. Another World is similarly about memory, and the way Barker connects the past with the present is absolutely chilling. A dysfunctional family patched together out of the remains of two previous marriages—Nick has a daughter, while Fran has two sons and another child on the way—moves into an old house with a hidden and horrible past. Meanwhile, Nick must tend to his 101-year-old grandfather Geordie, a survivor of the trenches in France haunted by his brother's terrible fate in combat. Just as Geordie's memories of the war come rushing back as he drifts closer to death, the history of Nick's new house returns with the unearthing of a disturbing mural buried beneath the aged wallpaper, a hideous portrait of a family not unlike his own. Another World is a quintessentially British work, full of repressed characters and simmering passive-aggression right out of the Victorian Age, yet the novel is still contemporary. The family's failed attempts at interaction—awkward outings inevitably provoke violent sibling conflict—accurately reflects a modern fragmented household, while Geordie's struggle with the decisions he made many years earlier is a powerful reminder that courage and cowardice all eventually lead to the same bleak end. As good as the Regeneration trilogy was, Barker's latest book, teeming with ambiguity and trailing brave loose ends, is brilliant: a masterpiece of mood and emotion with few matches in modern literature.