In the Crossfire
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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.’
Used to be Great Friends
C.J. Driver
‘This is a photograph of a twenty-first birthday party in the late winter of 1962.’
Life at Tilty Mill
Christopher Barker
‘This was the wild bunch that peopled my childhood nightmares.’
Orange People
Tim Guest
‘Never in history had so much orange gathered together to say 'Beloved' so often.’
On the Roof
Geoff Dyer
‘Destiny, I think, is not what lies in store for you; it's what is already stored up inside you—and it's as patient as death.’
The Siege of Mazar-i-Sharif
Luke Harding
‘We didn't know it then, but this was the end of the Taliban—their final surrender after what had been (though, again, those of us who witnessed it had no way knowing this at the time) the most significant struggle of the short war in Afghanistan. Was this final struggle intended? Was the slaughter inevitable? Or was it, as many armed conflicts must be, a long series of mistakes born out of vengefulness, ignorance and fear?’
Another Age
Helon Habila
‘This snapshot of us in the foyer of the MuSoN Hall has come to symbolize a lot of things to me. Our smiles seem to say that the worst for our country is over, we are gazing beyond the camera into a new and brighter future, where we could be poets without fear of arrest, murder or exile. We had cheques worth 50,000 naira and 20,000 naira in our pockets. But above all the picture is a confirmation of my deepest dream, that of becoming a writer.’
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.
Two Farms: One Black, One White
Lindsey Hilsum
‘They were both in their early forties. We drank tea on the veranda, watching the dogs play as the water sprinkler greened the lawn. This was the Africa of the white man's dream, where nature can be subdued inside the compound, but where the bush extends in its thrilling wildness just beyond the fence.’
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.’
King’s Girls
Lindsay Watson
‘The effeteness of a small number of King's students was fascinating to me at first, then repellent, and before long completely uninteresting. They dressed in peculiar clothes, talked in silly voices and appeared to me to be living caricatures of the human race. At times I longed for some familiar ordinariness and found it with boys from other colleges who introduced me to football and pool and pubs.’
The Elk’s Funeral
Todd McEwen
‘Against each wall stands an ornate throne—junk, dark Victorian junk, pulled by crowbar twenty years ago from the old lodge in the doomed downtown. Sitting on each is a battered looking Elk in a frayed tuxedo or black suit, his shoes cracked as the skin around his eyes. You feel sure they will sleep, and soon.’
Seminarians
Marcos Villatoro
‘The seminary building, parked smack in the middle of the campus, looked west to Davis Hall (women), south to another women's dorm building, and east to the vocationless, unharnessed men of Beast Hall. What did they expect, with so many earthly reminders of flesh around us? Out of the fourteen young men who discerned the call, few, very few, made it to ordination.’
What Franco Did for Me
Stuart Christie
‘I began to question my assumptions about the nature of good and evil.’
You, the Viewers at Home
Andrew O’Hagan
‘Every time I drink a glass of claret it goes straight to my face.’
Jubilee Girl
Fintan O’Toole
‘Those who control the image of the monarchy did not then know the power of indifference.’
Hotel Oblivion
Geoff Dyer
‘The mushrooms made an unexpected comeback and all the accumulated confusion of the day burst in upon us and left us stranded in an alien city’.
What Sheba Did Wrong
Zoë Heller
‘Women observing other women tend to be engrossed by the details—the bodily minutiae, the clothing particulars.’
The Rollercoaster Champion of The World
Andrew Martin
‘As he spoke, I thought how much Richard himself looked like a flyer: at forty-three he is symmetrical and compact, like Scott Tracy, the handsomest of those idealized pilots in Thunderbirds.’
Dear Tyrant
Riccardo Orizio
‘The deposed emperor was in shock. He spent his days playing, at maximum volume, a patriotic record’
The Search for Dr Bloch
Jason Cowley
‘How did it feel to have a Jewish grandfather who owed his life to the friendship, or gratitude, or mercy, of Adolf Hitler?’
I Gave the Names
Adrian Leftwich
‘We are all capable of self-deceit, especially when seeking to tell the truth.’
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.’
Dervishes
Rory Stewart
‘For a Dervish, religion is all about some direct mystical experience of God’.
Marek Marek
Olga Tokarczuk
‘It hurt for no particular reason, just as the sun rises each morning and the stars come out each night. ’
The Way You Do It
Rachel Cusk
‘He merely desired to unpick her from the snag of what seemed vaguely to him to be her femininity.’
