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Time’s Arrow

Martin Amis

‘I came rushing upward out of the blackest sleep to find myself surrounded by doctors.’

Isis in Darkness

Margaret Atwood

‘The lock splits. The iron gate swings open. She emerges, raises her arms towards the suddenly chilled moon. The world changes.’

Electric City

Richard Ford

‘No one, I think, thought Great Falls would burn.’

Fiction by Richard Ford.

New World (Part Three)

Jonathan Raban

‘To my eyes, airplane always looked impertinently casual on the page; it robbed the amazing machine of its proper mystery.’

On a Boat to Tangier

Tahar Ben Jelloun

‘He inspected the chest where the snakes slept. There was the viper, quiet, in a deep sleep.’

Centre of Gravity

Victoria Tokareva

‘For reasons I don’t want to go into, I decided to commit suicide.’

Our Circle

Ludmilla Petrushevskaya

‘I am afraid that my memory is confused about these events, the final events of my life, by which I mean what happened before I started to go blind.’

The Siege of Leningrad

Mikhail Steblin-Kamensky

‘Alexander Ivanovich woke at six, the hour when radio broadcasting would normally have begun, but the radio had been silent for a month now.’

Democracy

Joseph Brodsky

‘Nothing, really, Petrovich. That Georgian, you know, that foreign minister of theirs, says that half an hour ago, Himself announced at a press conference that democracy is being introduced here.’

New World (Part Two)

Jonathan Raban

‘It was how Europeans had always seen American nature – as shockingly bigger, more colourful, more deadly, more exotic, than anything they’d seen at home.’

New World (Part One)

Jonathan Raban

‘At first sight the ship was bigger than the dock in which it floated, a whale sprawled in a hip-bath‘.

Msinga

Rian Malan

‘Some ten miles beyond the last white town, you cross the border between the First and Third Worlds, between white South Africa and black kwaZulu.‘

Speaking of Courage

Tim O'Brien

‘The war was over and there was no place in particular to go.‘

Feminine Mystique

Josef Škvorecký

‘I don't think that’s such a hot idea. Resistance isn't for girls.’