Double Vision Book

Provocative, intense and deeply moving, Double Vision is a powerful story of one man's quest to find redemption amidst the horror of twenty-first century war. Returning from Afghanistan after his photographer friend is killed by a sniper, war reporter Stephen Sharkey seeks release from his nightmares in an England seemingly at peace with itself. Questioning man's inhumanity to man both abroad and at home, and whether love really can be the great redeemer, Double Vision is a searing novel of conflict in modern times.

The New Yorker

Kate Frobisher is a recently widowed sculptor, who, temporarily crippled by a car accident, is forced to employ help to complete a fifteen-foot sculpture of Christ. Nearby lives a colleague of her late husband, a foreign correspondent who is taking a break from Bosnia and Afghanistan to write a book about “ways of representing war.” In his downtime, he philosophizes with Kate about voyeurism and human suffering. There are flashes in Barker’s tenth novel of the electrifying prose that readers have come to expect from her. But its central preoccupation, with social and moral vision, is shamelessly heavy-handed, and the novel is further encumbered by a jumble of lacklustre minor characters and grand themes.