Border Crossing - Softcover

Barker, Pat

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0140270744 ISBN 13: 9780140270747

Publisher: Penguin, 2002

Synopsis

An unflinching novel on the nature of evil from the Booker Prize-winning and Women's Prize-shortlisted author of The Silence of the Girls

'Rich, surprising, breathtaking' The Times

'A tremendous piece of writing, sad and terrifying. It keeps you reading, exhausted and blurry-eyed, until 2am' Independent on Sunday

'Barker probes not only the mysteries of 'evil' but society's horrified and incoherent response to it' Guardian

'Brilliantly crafted. Unflinching yet sensitive, this is a dark story expertly told' Daily Mail

When Tom Seymour, a child psychologist, plunges into a river to save a young man from drowning, he unwittingly reopens a chapter from his past he'd hoped to forget. For Tom already knows Danny Miller. When Danny was ten Tom helped imprison him for the killing of an old woman. Now out of prison with a new identity, Danny has some questions - questions he thinks only Tom can answer.

Reluctantly, Tom is drawn back into Danny's world - a place where the border between good and evil, innocence and guilt is blurred and confused. But when Danny's demands on Tom become extreme, Tom wonders whether he has crossed a line of his own - and in crossing it, can he ever go back?

About this title

Review

Border Crossing is haunted by one of the most disturbing figures in contemporary English culture: the child who kills. The award-winning Regeneration trilogy established Pat Barker's reputation as a novelist able to revive the traumas of war at the beginning of the 20th century. But her most recent fiction (Another World and, now, Border Crossing) revisits the terrain of her first novels (Union Street, Blow Your House Down). The dismal, if commonplace, violence of family life, violence between husbands and wives, fathers and children, children and children is explored alongside the more sensational story of a young man, Danny, whom, tracking down the psychologist who helped to convict him for the murder he committed as a child, wants to "talk about how impossible it was to leave the past behind". A tense, and seductive, relation develops between Danny and Tom Seymour, a professional forced to make his own return to a past in which he has played a defining part in someone else's life. As the brutal details of Danny's crime emerge, Barker confronts the possibilities of cure through time, through speech, through the attention given by one man to another. Danny is a man who is "very, very good at getting people to step across that invisible border", a character who draws attention to the pain, and helplessness, of having been a child. But Border Crossing also refuses to lose sight of his victim. The mutilated body of Lizzie Parks makes a claim on Danny, on Barker and on her readers as this novel probes the relation between Danny and Tom for the "only possible good outcome" of an irreparable act. --Vicky Lebeau

Review

"It's her canny feel for the psyche's ambiguous meanderings, more than plot twists, that generates most of the thrills . . . This author creates an atmosphere of menace worthy of a Joyce Carol Oates."-Dan Cryer, "Newsday" "Barker soars to new heights with this harrowing, contemporary study of fate tainted by the stench of evil."-Robert Allen Papinchak, "USA Today" "Barker creates a sense of menace worth of Ian McEwan . . . "Border Crossing" is replete with sharp, expressive exchanges, hard poetry, and as many enigmas as implacable truths."-Kerry Field, "The Atlantic Monthly" "Barker writes with compelling urgency-"Border Crossing" is to be read in one sitting."-Joan Mellen, "The Baltimore Sun" "Exhilerating moral exploration, and prose as naked and jolting as an unwrapped live wire."-Richard Eder, "The New York Times Book Review" "Pat barker understands the dynamics of psychic and shutdown as well as any writer living . . . In "Bo

About this edition

• Publisher: Penguin
• Publication date: 2002
• ISBN 10: 0140270744
• ISBN 13: 9780140270747
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 288