In England, meanwhile, debate raged over the imminent release from custody of Robert Thompson and Jon Venables, two 19-year-olds who abducted and killed 2-year-old James Bulger in 1993, when they were 11. The more lenient British court system offered Bulger's killers a second chance -- and the public was not pleased. In their eight years in a juvenile detention home, the boys, according to a judge, have shown no "aggression or propensity for violence" and can be released in August. Bulger's horrified parents are appealing the decision, and public opinion seems to be firmly on their side.

Barker is a novelist who specializes in big, often torturously unsettling social and moral questions. Yet her fiction is, as she puts it, "character-driven," concerned primarily with the arcs of individual lives as they grapple with larger historical forces. Her acclaimed trilogy of novels set during World War I -- "Regeneration" (1991), "The Eye in the Door" (1993) and "The Ghost Road" (1995), which won the Booker Prize -- presented a panorama of memorable characters, many of them actual historical figures, such as poet and Army officer Siegfried Sasson and neurologist William Rivers, whose work with Sassoon and other shellshocked soldiers helped him develop influential theories of the psychological effects of trauma.

In "Another World," Barker continued looking at the impact of the war on the English psyche through the story of a family of a World War I veteran who discover that, decades ago, the house they've moved into was the scene of a grisly murder. Now, with "Border Crossing," she's rooted a story firmly in the present, but the echoes of a past event -- namely, 10-year-old Danny Miller's murder of 68-year-old Lizzie Parks -- will not go away. Now 23, Danny finds his way back into the life of Tom Seymour, the psychologist whose testimony had helped convict him. The two try to piece together what happened on the afternoon Danny smothered the old woman when she surprised him as he was robbing her house. Reviewing Danny's childhood, spent with a passive mother and an authoritarian father who thought up degrading physical punishments for his son such as hanging him for hours from a hook in a barn, Tom also tries to help Danny find the seeds of his violence in what has passed for a relatively normal childhood.

Salon visited Barker at her home in Durham, a picturesque university town in the north of England.

In "Border Crossing," Danny Miller is set free at age 21 under an assumed identity. When you wrote the book, were you aware that the killers of James Bulger were on the verge of being released?

I knew the two boys were being considered for release, but I had no way of knowing it was going to hit the headlines at that particular moment. I would say "Border Crossing" has been the best received of all my books in England, and I think that's because it touched a particular area of unease that the James Bulger case brought up. We became a much more self-questioning country after that major crime was committed by children. When children do something like this it creates a feeling of despair of the future. It really does reverberate.

In America, we're facing the same sort of unease in the case of Lionel Tate, the boy in Florida who was recently given life without parole.

Yes. And the difference in the law between England and America may be something of a barrier to American readers -- though it shouldn't be because the characters are striking enough to overcome that. There is no such thing as life without parole in England anyway, though there are people like [British serial killers] Myra Hindley and Ian Brady, who everyone knows will never be released. I think the true parallel with America, if there is one, is with the high school shootings [in Columbine], where suddenly you had nice kids from good homes committing major crimes. But we also have the example here in England of Mary Bell, who killed two little boys in 1968 when she was 11 years old. She was eventually released from prison and rehabilitated, within the limits of possibility.

Maya Angelou reads from "The Heart of a Woman"