With her now classic Regeneration trilogy, Pat Barker became synonymous with World War I-era historical fiction. Toby’s Room (Doubleday, $25.95) returns to several characters Barker introduced in Life Class, and here she intertwines their stories with that of the development of reconstructive surgery. In her latest powerful depiction of the era, Barker shows that the war’s traumatic effects spared no one, whether civilian or soldier. This is especially true for Elinor Brooke, feminist painter, sister of a doctor missing and presumed dead in France, and former lover of two wounded soldiers—one of whom she believes knows more about her brother’s fate than he’s telling. All Slade-trained artists, Elinor and the wounded men struggle to understand a world that offers both aesthetics and violence, and the war teaches them lessons no classroom ever could about how to see and portray the truth they find in a torn-up landscape or a ravaged human face.