Spark liked ’fun and games’ and had a genius for plots, in the sense of narrative sequences as well as secret scheming. She laid, and found, plots everywhere, and I have followed as best I can the instructions she planted for posterity in her biographies, fiction, autobiography, archives and the seventy-five ’rare’ interviews she gave. […]

After that they browsed for a minute or two in a semi-detached fashion. Nick found a set of Trollope which had a relatively modest and approachable look among the rest, and took down The Way We Live Now, with an armorial bookplate, the pages uncut. “What have you found there?” said Lord Kessler, in a […]

Places described by a lover are like no other places on earth. To learn a city in this way – boulevards curving, canals, cornices overhead – in the naked embrace, the luxury of listening while your skin is listening. The city slips into your body. And then, if you are fortunate enough to arrive there […]

Michael lit a cigarette and smoked it in silence. The others spoke haltingly, in sentences with atrocious syntax, accents so off she hardly recognised some words, but they went on. Aside from the obvious one, this was the real difference between them. They had the confidence to be foolish, to be wrong. She asked Michael […]

Strut, fly, gallop. There are so many ways to walk a street, but none of them will make you bulletproof. I got back from Mama’s and found myself stuck between street and gutter, Trevor knocking on the door early Sunday morning saying Vern been by again telling them they out if they don’t pay in […]

Yusuf’s new teacher wasted no time in putting him right on a number of matters. The day began at dawn and did not finish until Khalil said so. Nightmares and crying in the night were stupid so they were to have no more of that. Someone might think he was bewitched and have him sent […]

As they told their swaggering stories and marched across the rain-shadow plains of the great mountain, they did not know that they were to spend years fighting across swamps and mountains and forests and grasslands, in heavy rain and drought, slaughtering and being slaughtered by armies of people they knew nothing about: Punjabis and Sikhs, […]

Everybody said that there was a sex maniac loose in the complex and I thought—it’s about time. It had been a long asexual winter. The steam heat seemed to dry all of the body’s moistures and shrivel the fantasies of the mind. From the nineteenth floor of a building A, I watched snow fall on […]

I’m sure Michk’ heard the quick tap of the woman’s fingers on her keyboard. ’I have the name of a Miss Marie Chapier. Shall I call her?’’I don’t know…’’Is she your daughter?’’No.’’Do you want me to call her?’’Yes, please. Tell her I didn’t want to … truffle her, but it’s because I’m losing something, something […]

As I walked, I was thinking about the Great and Secret Knowledge, which the Other says will grant us strange new powers. And I realised something. I realised that I no longer believed in it. Or perhaps that is not quite accurate. I thought it was possible that the Knowledge existed. Equally I thought that […]

It’s been my habit of mind, over these years, to understand that every situation in which human beings are involved can be turned on its head. Everything someone assures me to be true might not be. Every pillar of belief the world rests on may or may not be about to explode. Most things don’t […]

’Once upon a time, there lived a girl and a boy called Aneeka and Parvaiz, who had the power to talk to animals.’ Aneeka laughed. ’Tell the one with the ostrich’, she said, voice muffled by her pillow. She was asleep before Isma was done telling the childhood story which their mother had invented for […]

From the terrace he had an open view of the place where he and Udayan had been raised. Lower rooftops of tin or tile, with squash vines trailing over them. The tops of walls, dotted white, splattered with excrement from crows. Two oblong ponds on the other side of the lane. The lowland, looking to […]