Highlights
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Imagining Scotland
Fintan O’Toole
‘There they found a man and a woman dressed in face masks, rubber gloves and white coats standing behind a white table on which were placed an assortment of tools’
Assault by Water
Tim Binding
‘Having come here for a purpose, to trace the fault line of his own history, he searches for the year that saw its inception.’
God Bless the Squire
Norman Lewis
‘From the age of five I attended Forty Hill Church School. Studies began every day with half an hour's catechism.’
Uncles
Jonathan Meades
‘Uncle Donald the boffin, Uncle Cecil the pharmacist, Uncle Edgar the optician and Uncle Edgar the boho restaurateur’
Trying to Understand
Philip Hensher
‘I liked his humourless intelligence, so redundant and so excessive in an MP.’
Mother Care
Jayne Anne Phillips
‘After the birth and the overnight in the hospital she didn’t go downstairs for a week.’
Doctors and Nurses
Blake Morrison
‘Skirtless, jumperless, she lies on the floor, her hair settling about her like a silky parachute.’
I Am Here
Brian Hall
‘We knew almost nothing about her before she was born, not even her sex, so we must have referred to her as “it”’
Salford, 1924
Leila Berg
‘Yesterday two boys got hold of me in the playground and banged my head against the wall over and over and said “Why did you kill Jesus?”’
Hazleton Public Schools, Pennsylvania
Judith Joy Ross & Liz Jobey
‘Growing up is learning how to take a stance, before the camera and before the world.’
Sluts
Susan Swan
‘It was Tom’s contention that you could spot a slut by the colour of her complexion.’
He’s One, Too
Allan Gurganus
‘In Falls, North Carolina, in 1957, we had just one way of “coming out”. It was called getting caught.’
Eternal Love
Karen E. Bender
‘After Lena and Bob were married in the Chapel of Eternal Love, Ella told them that new husbands and wives were not allowed to share a hotel bedroom.’
The Last Jews in Warsaw
Abraham Brumberg
‘I paid only one visit to the Jewish cemetery before the war, sometime in the spring of 1939. I was twelve years old.’
Integration
Sherman Alexie
‘Anonymous cries up and down the hallways. Linoleum floors swabbed with gray water. Mop smelling like old sex.’
Looking for the General
Madison Smartt Bell
‘Midday, and the sun thrummed from the height of its arc so that the lizard seemed to cast no shadow.’
Orno and Marshall
Ethan Canin
‘Marshall was unlike anyone Orno had ever met before. He was able to converse with Mr and Mrs Pboson as though he was of their own generation.’
The Revenant
Edwidge Danticat
‘Doctor Berto came with a new stethoscope to check Victoria’s heart. He was shocked to learn that she had died.’
Burning Mary
Tom Drury
‘Paul Emmons was a college student with no money behind him and none in front and so he seemed immune from trouble.’
Birthday Boy
Tony Earley
‘During the night something like a miracle happened: Jim's age grew an extra digit.’
The Speed of Sperm
Jeffrey Eugenides
‘I was born twice: once, as a baby girl, at 4.53 a.m. on a remarkably unpolluted Detroit day in 1960; and then again, as a teenage boy, in the offices of our family physician, Dr Arnold Philobosian, in 1976.’
Apples
David Guterson
‘He remembered the new, fresh, orchard country of his youth and the rows of apple trees his father had planted on the east bank of the Columbia River.’
