During a hazy Newcastle summer, Nick and his pregnant wife, Fran, are battling to keep the peace in their unhappy household. Fran's eleven-year-old son, Gareth, is showing increasing signs of rage and distress; Nick's adolescent daughter, Miranda, is cool and affectless. Both are visibly hostile to two-year-old Jasper, their half brother. As the situation begins to slip out of control, the family discovers under the old living-room wallpaper a group portrait of the Fanshawes, who lived in their house, Lob's Hill, some ninety years earlier. Hate-filled, obscene, deeply disturbing, the portrait reveals the state of the modern family's own hearts, and casts a terrifying shadow over their lives.

Meanwhile, Nick's centenarian grandfather, Geordie, lies dying in his home nearby, cared for by Nick and his aunt. As Geordie's health deteriorates, he becomes more and more mired in the past, obsessively reliving his years in the trenches in the World War I and the violent death met there by his brother, Harry. As events at Lob's Hill unfold, Nick begins to learn the secrets his grandfather has so long kept buried, and simultaneously to comprehend the reasons for his own family's misery. He learns the bitter lesson that old wounds can leak insistently into the present, and that tragic events often play out for many years. Powerful, harrowing, and finally cathartic, Another Worldproves, once again, that Pat Barker is one of the finest novelists of her generation.