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Termite’s Birthday, 1959
Jayne Anne Phillips
‘It's like by the time he was born there was too much to know.’
The Tutor
Nell Freudenberger
‘He hated the idea of learning words from a list; it was like taking vitamin supplements in place of eating.’
Helen and Julia
Sarah Waters
‘She felt exhausted, emptied out; she thought of the day that had passed—it was astonishing to her, that a single set of hours could contain so many separate states of violent feeling.’
Dinner with Dr Azad
Monica Ali
‘Six months now since she'd been sent away to London. Every morning before she opened her eyes she thought, if I were the wishing type, I know what I would wish.’
Gas, Boys, Gas
Andrew O’Hagan
‘The men were quiet. They said nothing for a minute and the sea at my back was calm and almost imaginary, but you could hear the waves coming to wash the chalk cliffs from under us.’
At The Villa Cockroft
Dan Rhodes
‘In Bosnia, it seemed, a deal was a deal and the Bosnian was ready to pay his rent.’
Field Study
Rachel Seiffert
‘The bushes grow dense across the top of the drop, but Martin can just see through the leaves: young mother and son, swimming in the pool hollowed out by the waterfall.’
The Hare
Toby Litt
‘For some little while now I have been chasing a hare—buck or doe, I do not know.’
After Caravaggio’s Sacrifice of Isaac
Rachel Cusk
‘It was right after he was born that I started looking at paintings.’
