Pat Barker: Border Crossing

By MICHELE HEWITSON

Out walking with his wife along a river bank, child psychologist Tom Seymour rescues a young man who has thrown himself into the water. In the resulting chaos he finds that the boy is taken to hospital wearing his coat.

When he visits the young man to retrieve it, Danny tells Tom that they had met before, when he was 10 and had another name. He was convicted for the murder of an old woman and it was Tom's evidence, based on his assessment of whether Danny knew right from wrong, which swayed the jury.

Is Danny's reappearance in Tom's life coincidence or "a dramatic gesture gone badly, almost fatally wrong?" Or is it something more sinister? This small, perfectly constructed and challenging novel tackles huge questions of coincidence and memory with an ease which provokes a growing sense of unease about our easy perceptions of what is good and what is evil.

Penguin

$24.95