While some of her novels have had a contemporary setting, such as her 2003 novel Double Vision that featured a war reporter suffering from post-traumatic stress syndrome, Barker says it is easier to tackle difficult and disturbing themes through historical fiction.

Q: In Life Class you return to the First World War. What is it about this period in history that fascinates you?
A: While writing Double Vision, I became fascinated by this great tension between the need to tell the truth and also represent the privacy of the people who have undergone terrible mutilations or undergone the loss of their loved ones.
I knew a lot about the artists of the First World War and their painting of the Western devastation epitomises what war is all about. It was those iconic images that brought me back to writing about this war in the end.

Q: You've written both contemporary and historical fiction, which do you prefer?
A: I think it's much easier to explore certain things from a historical perspective. The problem with the contemporary scene is that you don't have the same in-depth knowledge unless you're out there fighting.

And the reader knows what they think about it. For example, at the moment, they're either for the war in Iraq or against the war in Iraq and even if they don't know what they think that is a position they have taken up. I do believe dealing with a historical period, where people's entrenched interests are not involved, you can get them to think more openly about the issues than you can in a contemporary setting. And the issues are the same.

Q: In this novel, like your previous novels, your characters are faced with physical and psychological trauma. How do you see the role of fiction in tackling difficult themes?
A: The truest narratives are those that let in the most uncomfortable facts. I think the efforts of the therapist and the novelist sometimes overlap. What a therapist is doing is trying to get the patient to create a true narrative rather than telling a false story of their past, which may be sparing their own feelings or self-aggrandising or blaming someone else.

Q: How do you do your research?
A: I do research in a burst in the beginning and then continuously throughout the book. You need lots of little detail to bring a scene to life and you often don't know what that is until you are writing it.
Writing takes about three years as there are so many wrong turns and so much gets thrown away. At the end of a writing day I am almost incapable of stringing a sentence together.

Q: When did you know you wanted to be a writer?
A: I was 11, where I lived there was a wishing well, and I remember throwing in a coin and wishing to be a writer. So you see, it does work!

Q: Which novelists do you admire?
A: I actually find American novelists such as Toni Morrison or James Baldwin much more fruitful models than any English writer, because they reveal a way in which the voice of a community and that of an individual character could blend and merge and then differentiate itself again.

Q: Any tips for aspiring novelists?
A: Don't think about the market, write from your heart. The market just consists of a lot of things that have been published already. A good agent wants to be surprised by a new voice and you're not going to get that new voice while you are imitating other people.