Pat Barker

"But sir, certainly, there isn't any proof as to my guilt..."

"The man needs to learn how to controll his anger, he is crossing a border here, and he has no right"

"The forensic evidence for Danny's guilt was overwhelming, but he was a good liar."

"Danny was a bottomless pit. He wanted other people to fill him, only in the process the other people ended up drained."

"...the horror of the images impossible to connect with the child he'd just left."

"I thought he was one of the most dangerous boys we've ever had through the school."

"I don't know why I killed her, I didn't know then and I don't know now. And I don't know how to live with it."

"But [Tom] was used to switching off, to living his life in separate compartments."

"[Tom] denies [Lauren] his attention in memory, as he did in life."

"[Tom had] learnt to value detachment: the clinician's splinter of ice in the heart."

"When we got married, you didn't even want kids. It was... you and me."

"[Tom] was fed up to the back teeth with being a walking, talking sperm bank."

"It was extraordinarily distracting: this feeling of a pivotal moment in his own life being played out in front of an uninvited audience."

"[Danny] was very, very good at getting people to step across that invisible border. Lambs to the slaughter."

"You wring a chicken's neck, you don't expect to find it running round the yard next morning, do you?"

"Do you think it's different, killing a rabbit and killing a person?"

"They'd awoken that morning to a curious stillness. Clouds sagged over the river, and there was mist like sweat over the mudflats."

"[Tom] was less than halfway across the causeway when the mist thickened."

"The fired burnt furiously, piled high with logs. Danny had dragged the log basket onto the hearth rug and was kneeling beside it, a log in each hand, watching the fire burn."

"A rasp and flare as [Danny] struck the match. A doubled reflection of the flame appeared in his eyes, whose pupils had not contracted, as one would have expected, but grown large, as if starved for light."

"A second later, the water enclosed him in a coffin of ice."

"The boy [Danny] looked like a baby: purple faced, wet hair, that drowned look of a newborn, cast up on to its mother's suddenly creased and spongy belly."

"...he'd seen the boy's [Danny's] body hang suspended... an umbilical cord of silver bubbles linking his slack mouth to the air."

"[Lauren's] eyes were glazed, inward-looking. Like labour, Tom thought, the irony as sour as the mud on his tongue."

"Do you think confession's the only route to redemption?"