If you wanted to describe Mina in a few words, you might say she was an asthmatic girl who loved words and rode a pygmy hippopotamus. But if you wanted to distinguish her from everyone else in the world, you’d say that she was a girl who could strike a match more beautifully than anyone. I’m […]

Tea-time was Lady Milton’s favourite time of day. By four o’clock all the difficult bits of the day were over and she could slide gracefully towards dinner and nearly bed. Johnny – Lord Milton – had no interest in afternoon tea. Never had. They ate breakfast together and sometimes briefly came together for luncheon, but […]

Well, well, well, Rosie D’Antonio is thinking, this day is certainly looking up. Rosie hadn’t liked the death threats from Vasiliy Karpin, the chemicals billionaire, of course she hadn’t, but these things come with the territory. If you have any sort of personality, someone will eventually want to kill you. And she shouldn’t have done […]

Olive rolled her eyes. ”I don’t believe in God. That’s all rubbish,” she said firmly.”Okay, but think of this, Olive. If God is love, then that man was touched by God.”Olive rolled her eyes again.”And maybe you don’t believe in God – which is fine, I don’t care – but you have been loved. And […]

Pietro doesn’t dream. He has a rare night of deep and solid unthinking sleep. His breaths and heartbeats are smooth and few, his face resolved of its creases, his body a well of atom-self, an unworried sum of parts, as if he knows that outside the earth falls away in perpetual invention and leaves nothing […]

For nine-tenths of human time on earth, people went underground. Their symbolic world was formed in part by activities in caves, by modalities and visions that darkness promised. Then, this all ceased. The underground world was lost to us. The industrial uses of the earth: the digging, fracking, tunneling, are mere plunder and do not […]

Nicky was going with Doll by then and got to experience the house first-hand. The atmosphere was that of a continuous, continuously improvised party that periodically doldrums and never ended, contending playlists emanating from different rooms, a standing bank of smoke shimmering in seeming permanence in the sitting room, pin-eyed young ones rattling on the […]

”Tonight was lovely,” Eva said.”Mm,” Isabel said, washing her hands.”I really have been wanting to meet you, you know. You most of all. Louis has told me so much. You live in the old family home, right? In the house where you three grew–””I didn’t invite you here tonight.”Eva was caught in a breath, mouth […]

It is, of course, impossible to be certain of what is contained in anyone’s chest, least of all one’s own or those we know well, perhaps especially those we know best, but, as I stand here on the upper level of King’s Cross Station, from where I can monitor my old friend Hosam Zowa walking […]

You will wonder about the name Victoria once you find out your real mother named you that while she was dying and birthing you. Wonder if she was saying the word Victory! out loud at some unknown triumph, perhaps the sound of you crying as you came out, that you came out alive, that she […]

You must understand: There is no single day on which a war begins. The conflict will collect around you gradually, the way carrion birds assemble around the vulnerable, until there are so many predators that the object of their hunger is not even visible. You will not even be able to see yourself in the […]

I look about me questioningly. The media are scribbling, Julian’s KC is talking to his instructing solicitor, making out it is nothing to him, that if the jury aren’t there, this doesn’t add anything. He’s right. I know I don’t have much time before he is on his feet again. So I speak up once […]

Nothing is more flattering to an artist than the illusion that he is a secret revolutionary. These public developments created a feeling among the cast that we were, in fact, preparing ourselves on a training base for an operation with a transcendental goal, that in combing our translated lines for subtext we were fighting the […]

I cannot get enough of Dutch art. You can turn to this other world – and it is a picture world as no other, a whole society visualised through time and place, seasons and generations, moment by – and live inside it in your thoughts. There is always more of it, and then inexhaustibly more. […]

Leon opens the door wide. They all look at him. Social workers have two pretend faces, pretend Happy and Pretend Sad. They’re not supposed to get angry so they make angry into sad. This time they’re pretending to care about him and Jake and his mum.”I want to get my things,” he says.They all look […]

Only when I was young did I believe that it was important to remember what happened in every novel I read. Now I know the truth: what matters is what you experience while reading, the states of feeling that the story evokes, the questions that rise to your mind, rather than the fictional events described. […]

Franklin’s Great Novel, begun after graduation, was an attempt to produce a ’fictional text’ based on chaos theory. He entitled it What If? ’I’m trying,’ he declared to anyone who would listen (not many), ’to re-create the fractal in fictive form – an endlessly bifurcating narrative, based not on making a choice but on making […]

Before he became a father, he imagined the relationship as being like an intensive version of owning a pet. The child, he thought, was essentially a passive, a vessel into which you poured your love. On TV that’s how it looked. Children were silent, dormant; you went into their bedrooms, gazed down at them fondly, […]

On this random Monday, just moments before his first day of secondary school,Jamie O’Neill knows:his mother’s liver enzymes elevated, and that a complex system overheated in her young body in those precious and devastating moments after giving birth to him –as was first determined in labour by her proteinuriaand he knows from his researchthat her […]

’Darling, now listen. You know about me being beautiful?’ ’You’re all right.’ ’No, Rudolph, please say I’m beautiful; it’s part of the thing.’ ’I suppose you’re going to tell me you’re a beautiful female spy?’ ’In a way, I was.’ ’Yes, I’m quite sure you were. And that you have a Chief, but you don’t […]

I met my move quick-time, slip into the mass of closed-eyed skankers, sucked into the slipstream of rippling spines. Try to get as close as I can to the decks, watch the MC, see how he handles the mic and the controls. We’re dancing in darkness, skinning up with the dead. I feel them twisting […]

It went around the village quickly. No one really knew what to do or say. Still, Kit and Paddy were kept busy with the visitors those first few days. People climbed the lane up from the main road in twos and threes and walked the fields down from Jamestown and Bunnacree to sympathize and speculate […]

You’ve been wondering about your own relationship to open water. You’ve been wondering about the trauma and how it always finds its way to the surface, floating in the ocean. You’ve been wondering about how to protect that trauma from consumption. You’ve been wondering about departing, about being elsewhere. You have always thought if you […]

Years ago in New York City I had taught at a community college and there was a man who taught there as well, he was much older than I was, and he retired soon after I got there. He was a nice man, with thick eyebrows, and he was quiet, though he seemed to like […]

It turned out that it was Ramsay Coker who was in charge over at the Sphinx. In Freda’s opinion, Ramsay Coker was a first-class twit. His head was always in the clouds. ’I’m writing a novel,’ he told her, as if that was something to crow about, as if there weren’t enough novels in the […]

I will admit that the murder of Bethany Waites was my idea.We were all looking through the files for a new Thursday Murder Club case. There was a spinster in Rye in the early eighties, for example, who had died, leaving three unidentified skeletons and a suitcase containing fifty thousand pounds in her cellar. That […]

Tholukuthi it took the first decade of the donkey’s married life for her, by patiently piecing together fragments of the Father of the Nation’s nightmares and sleep talk, sometimes including whole conversations, lectures, debates, arguments, pleas, confessions, musings, by paying special attention to the intimate talk of the Seat of Power and Inner Circle, to […]

Polly was now dancing with her uncle, Boy. She did not look radiant and happy as such a spoilt darling should at her coming-out ball, but tired and pinched about the mouth, nor was she chattering away like the other women. ’I shouldn’t care for one of my girls to look like that,’ Aunt Sadie […]

It was unreal to have your city turned inside and out. He felt unreal those days of the riots when his streets were made strange by violence. Despite what America saw on the news, only a fraction of the community had picked up bricks and bats and kerosene. The devastation had been nothing compared to […]

Woooooooo- hooooooo what a fall what a soar what a plummet what a dash into dark into light what a plunge what a glide thud crash what a drop what a rush what a swoop what a fright what a mad hushed skirl what a smash mush mash-up broken and gashed what a heart in […]

And then he’s gone. She can hear him walking away up the passage. His footsteps sound hesitant, but he doesn’t turn back. Nor will the moment return, which is true of all moments, though not equally. Alone in Pa’s study, what the room will always be to her, she lies down and closes her eyes […]

Probably the question I am asked more often than any other is: Do you honestly believe there is hope for our world? For the future of our children and grandchildren? And I am able to answer truthfully, yes. I believe we still have a window of time during which we can start healing the harm […]

On rough nights when Robin retreated to my bed, he wanted to be on the side farthest from the endless terrors outside the window. (His mother had always wanted the safe side, too.) He daydreamed, had trouble with deadlines, and yes, he refused to focus on things that didn’t interest him. But he never fidgeted […]

I do wish something exciting would happen again. I don’t mind what.Perhaps a fire, but where no one gets hurt? Just flames and fire engines. We can all stand around watching, with flasks, and Ron can shout advice to the firefighters. Or an affair, that would be fun. Preferably mine, but I’m not greedy, so […]

’It’s not a secret,’ said Leopold haughtily.’Oh, Miss Fisher said it was.’’Did she tell you not to ask me things?’’How do you mean?’ she said, flustered.Leopold smiled to himself. ’She told me not to answer, whatever you said. She hopes I won’t say anything.’’Then ought you to?’ said Henrietta, reproving.’I don’t have to be obedient […]

We had never learnt to dance, and, for some reason, we had supposed it to be a thing which everybody could do quite easily and naturally. I think Linda realized there and then what it took me years to learn, that the behavior of civilized man really has nothing to do with nature, that all […]

Dark had so gained the trees that Lois, turning back from the window, was surprised at how light the room was. Day still coming in from the fields by the south windows was stored in the mirrors, in the sheen of the wallpaper, so that the room still shone. Mr. Montmorency had come in and […]

Jeanie rounds up the chickens early and sits beside Dot’s grave to eat a sandwich she made at Bridget’s. Already the earth mound is green with a forest of seedling weeds and the area is visible only if you know to look for it. She feels as though she should apologize to Dot for making […]

Despite the awful weather, the decks were packed. As the ship slid free, the band on the jetty struck up with a round of ’Rule Britannia’, and passengers hurled down hundreds of thousands of streamers that filled the dock in a giant web, while Enid whooped and blew kisses, though presumably not to anyone she […]

Elizabeth had formed the Thursday Murder Club with Penny. Penny had been an inspector in the Kent Police for many years, and she would bring along the files of unsolved murder cases. She wasn’t really supposed to have the files, but who was to know? After a certain age, you can pretty much do whatever […]