I had expected that a tutor was a sort of vessel which would tip and empty its contents into my brain and I would be full of education. Instead, my tutor opened for me daily the Book of Life and bid me peruse where I would in pursuit, not so much of answers – for […]

Isällä oli tapana sanoa, että maailma joutui pahasti hakoteille siinä vaiheessa, kun ihminen erkaantui luonnosta. Hän sanoi, että tuon fataalin virheen voisi ehkä korjata, jos onnistuisimme villiinnyttämään itsemme uudelleen. Mutta minä en käsitä, miten se voisi onnistua, kun pelkkä olemassaolomme pelottaa luontokappaleita, joiden kanssa uusi yhteys pitäisi löytää. Asia surettaa minua, ja antaisin mitä tahansa, […]

That ring at the door that I loved so much would bring, in the afternoon, my mother’s friends or, on rare occasions, my married aunts. In the evening a much more exciting variety of family friends rang the bell, many of them fairly eccentric, in whom I took a deep interest. Only a few months […]

No, I’d open a refuge for mothers. A retreat. Concrete 1970s brutalism, an anti-domestic architecture without flounces. Something low with big windows and wide corridors, carpets to deaden sound. There will be five or six rooms off the corridor, each with a wall of glass and sliding doors looking on to a cold, grey beach. […]

”Minusta tuntuu yhäkkiä, että Peter on suunnitellut kaiken etukäteen. Että hän otti minut ja pani Skotlantiin, jotta pojilla olisi paikka jonne vetäytyä. Aina kun pojat tulevat koulusta lomalle, esitämme eräänlaista perhenäytelmää. Joskus se tuntuu vilpittömän hyvältä. Nyt sitten mietin, onko Peterin mieli ollut koko ajan muualla.” ”Voi tyttökulta, tyttökulta, miesten mieli on aina muualla, niin […]

Dawn. There’s no sunrise, no birdsong. Light seeps over the water, through the branches. The sky is lying on the loch, filling the trees, heavy in the spaces between the pine needles, settling between blades of grass and mottling the pebbles on the beach. Although there’s no distance between cloud and land, nowhere for rain […]

Her body hung off the side of the bed, and by the odd angle Shuggie could tell the drink had spun her all night like a Catherine wheel. He turned her head to the side to stop her choking on her rising boak. Then he placed the mop bucket near the bed and gently unzipped […]

In the emails today was one from a former employee, Sara, who worked for me during school holidays a few years ago: ’Yo Bitch-tits, I need a reference. Here’s the form attached. Make it good, you bastard or I will come and get you.’ So I wrote this and emailed it to her. TO WHOM […]

These girls formed the Brodie set. That was what they had been called even before the headmistress had given them the name, in scorn, when they had moved from the Junior to the Senior school at the age of twelve. At that time they had been immediately recognisable as Miss Brodie’s pupils, being vastly informed […]

Kirjeromaaneissa on jo lähtökohtaisesti jotain hyvin romanttista ja nostalgista. Jessica Brockmolen Kirjeitä saarelta sopiikin hyvin juhannuksen romanttiseen tunnelmaan. Ottaen huomioon, että vietän juhannuksen saaressa sadesäässä, tämän lukeminen olisi varmaan kannattanut säästää sitä varten. No ehkä joku muu ehtii vielä napata vinkin ja pääsee nauttimaan tämän ihastuttavan kirjan tunnelmasta sateen ropistessa ikkunaan. Se on sodan aikaansaannosta. […]