It was then that I saw the business of writing for what it truly was and is to me. It is your penance for not being lucky. It is an attempt to reach others and to make them love you. It is your instinctive protest, when you find you have no voice at the world’s […]

She will be found tomorrow morning dead from multiple stab-wounds, her wrists bound with a silk scarf and her ankles bound with a man’s necktie, in the grounds of an empty villa, in a park of the foreign city to which she is traveling on the flight now boarding at Gate 14. Crossing the tarmac […]

Edith, in her veal-colored room in the Hotel du Lac, sat with her hands in her lap, wondering what she was doing there. And then remembered, and trembled. And thought with shame of her small injustices, of her unworthy thoughts towards those excellent women who had befriended her, and to whom she had revealed nothing. […]

Far beneath the surface of the earth, hidden from the sun and the moon, upon the shores of the Starless Sea, there is a labyrinthine collection of tunnels and rooms filled with stories. Stories written in books and sealed in jars and painted on walls. Odes inscribed onto skin and pressed into rose petals. Tales […]

She returned to her thoughts. Did the night-ghosts and fairies and jacky lanterns and other citizens of the secret commonwealth exist only in her imagination? Was there a logical, rational, scientific explanation for such things? Or were they inaccessible to science, and baffling to reason? Did they exist at all? ‘Such things’ included dæmons, surely. […]

They knew our names and they knew our parents. But they did not know us, because not knowing was essential to their power. To sell a child right from under his mother, you must know that mother only in the thinnest way possible. To strip a man down, condemn him to be beaten, flayed alive, […]

More images come then, one superimposed on the next. And I abandon chronology in favour of waves of memory, overlapping and merging. My final look through the judas hole: I am kneeling on the bare boards of my attic bathroom at Lyntons, one eye pressed to the lens that sticks up from the floor, a […]

Nostalgia Nalan believed there were two kinds of families in this world: relatives formed the blood family; and friends, the water family. If your blood family happened to be nice and caring, you could count your lucky stars and make the most of it; and if not, there was still hope; things could take a […]

Part of what made the old world so terrible, so prone to destruction, was a total lack of preparation for the personal energies often called feelings. Mother told us about these kind of energies. Especially dangerous for women, our bodies already so vulnerable in ways that the bodies of men are not. It was a […]

It begins with music. I must have been about two years old. My bed was by a window; the sun was shining in. I remember my father lying next to me, playing the violin, his eyes hidden behind black glasses. The scroll of the violin was pressed against the mattress; the instrument’s lower body was […]

The car engine made a few clicking sounds as they sat in silence. “You asked about my mother,” Pete said after a few moments. “Nobody has ever asked about my mother. But the truth is, I don’t know if my mother loved us or not. I don’t know about her in some big way.” He […]

He prayed fundamentally as a gesture of love for what had gone and would go and could be loved in no other way. When he prayed he touched his parents, who could not otherwise be touched, and he touched a feeling that we are all children who lose our parents, all of us, every man […]

I see now that I wasn’t thinking straight that weekend. Maybe I hadn’t been thinking straight since the beginning, since that luminous Saturday morning in July when I took my seat at the lido café and came face to face with our bewitching new lake of ultramarine. Since I’d begin seeing Elm Hill in spangled, […]

What he carried with him, all he carried with him, was a lack, something like a lack of air, of proper behaviour in his lungs, a difficulty that he supposed would go on forever. The girl he’d been talking to, whom he’d once known – she had spoken of her children. The loss of her […]