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Black Milk
Tina Makereti
‘Despair sat on her shoulders where her wings should have been. Darkness consumed her, the quivering lip of a dying abalone, grease in the barrel of a gun.’ 2016 Commonwealth Short Story Prize – regional winner for the Pacific.
Here We Are
Lucy Caldwell
‘‘Here we are,’ she said, as we faced each other, and my whole body rushed with goosebumps.’
Mr Salary
Sally Rooney
‘My love for him felt so total and so annihilating that it was often impossible for me to see him clearly at all.’
The Visitor
Colin Barrett
‘The dog was some sort of overbred weedling with a ribcage fine-boned as a chicken’s, a wizened rat’s face and a goony, perpetually bloodshot stare that made Dev Hendrick want to punt the thing over the garden gate.’
Green, Mud, Gold
Sara Baume
‘She shuts her eyes and pictures ears growing out through her ears, her spine turning to wood, pictures herself as a girl-woman scarecrow, arms opened wide, and nailed to two posts in the centre of a great green, mud and gold expanse, crucified.’
The Birds of June
John Connell
‘Her dreams were interrupted occasionally by the sound of the cow and her newborn calf from the outhouse sheds. A low bellow would crinkle the folds of her mind and then seconds later it would be answered from some other shed in the distance.’
All We Shall Know
Donal Ryan
‘Thoughts sharpen themselves on the flints of one another and pierce me like a knife in my middle, sunk deep and twisted around.’
A Visit to the Zoo
Colm Tóibín
‘The two chameleons in a glass case appeared to interest all of them, Heinrich thought, because of their beauty and their stillness. They looked like a pale painting.’
The Wonder
Emma Donoghue
‘Lib didn’t like to bang harder in case of disturbing the family. Brightness leaked from the door of the byre, off to her right. Ah, the women had to be milking. A trail of melody; was one of them singing to the cows?’
The Mountain Road
William Wall
‘Funeral homes are always cold. There were pine benches in lines like a church. They had been varnished recently and there was that heady smell. It reminded me of my father’s boat, the wheelhouse brightwork newly touched up. It was the smell of childhood.’
Through the Night
Siobhán Mannion
‘The person in the mirror watches her, slightly swollen, slightly blurred.’
