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Leading Men

Peter Ho Davies

‘Outside, a technicolour sunset is giving way to the silvery sweep of searchlights, as a hand tugs the blackout curtain across the sky.’

Room 536

A.L. Kennedy

‘The world cannot be as this is, I refuse to accept it.’

Look at Me, I’m Beautiful!

Ben Rice

‘When I came back from Gwen's I had expected to find him in the throes of his midlife koisis—you know—trimming an anal fin in the bath, or nursing a slime coat at the very least.’

Here We Go

David Peace

‘The finance officers read the answers in silence, then returned them to be burned.’

In Time of War

Philip Hensher

‘They set off, walking in a slow way without map or plan.’

The Dreamed

Robert McLiam Wilson

‘His life needed more magic. Or more God.’

Martha, Martha

Zadie Smith

‘Outside a plane roared low like some prehistoric bird, Pam shuddered; Martha did not move.’

The Cyrillic Alphabet

Adam Thirlwell

‘Olga was noble. She was Amazonian. She felt exhausted and humiliated, but she also had force.’

Lila.exe

Hari Kunzru

‘That smile. The start of all your problems.’

Soft Core

Joyce Carol Oates

‘They were two sisters of youthful middle age with three breasts between them and a history that might be summed up as much left unsaid.’

Fiction by Joyce Carol Oates.

Scouting for Boys

Paul Theroux

‘Three figures came single file over a wooded hill of the Fells carrying their rifles one-handed and keeping their heads low. They were duckwalking, hunched like Indian trackers, with the same stealth in their footfall, toeing the mushy earth of early spring. I was one of them, the last, being careful, watching for the stranger, his black hat, his blue Studebaker. Walter Herkis and Chicky DePalma were the others. When we got to the clearing where the light slanted through the bare trees and into our squinting faces you could see we were twelve years old.’

What Sheba Did Wrong

Zoë Heller

‘Women observing other women tend to be engrossed by the details—the bodily minutiae, the clothing particulars.’

What the Sky Sees

Jon McGregor

‘This place that I have grown up in is a landscape of straight lines, a field of vision dominated by the parallel and the perpendicular.’

Marek Marek

Olga Tokarczuk

‘It hurt for no particular reason, just as the sun rises each morning and the stars come out each night. ’