That First Time
Sort by:
The Gourmet
John Lanchester
‘I have vivid memories of my one or two visits to my brother during his incarceration in various gulags.’
How It Ends
Andrew O’Hagan
‘Seagulls murmur overhead, and nip at the banks. You can hear almost nothing.’
Our Mother’s New Man
Andrea Ashworth
‘To keep her eye on the cost, our mother set the clockwork oven-timer ticking when she picked up the phone.’
Hitler and the Billygoat
John Sweeney
‘The court martial was held in secret, because it concerned the security of the state.’
Plato Speaks
Caroline Alexander
‘Photographs showed a wood-panelled room, furnished with a long table spread with a leopard skin.’
Bicycle Thieves
Blake Morrison
‘Late June, scorched grass and sprinklers, the sky as if scuffed and beaten. Too hot to work, too lazy to think.’
LA Women
Douglas Brooker
‘I was bored. That was how it started. Anything I ever did that amounted to anything–or not–has always been the result of being sick of doing something else.’
Trouble at the Waterworks
Edward Blishen
‘Old age is a sustained process of injury. You are being very distinctly shot at.’
The Professor’s History
Claire Messud
‘The call of the muezzin reached his ears only as a muffled wail, the keeper of ritual and the passage of time.’
The Lady with the Laptop
Clive Sinclair
‘It is Friday, and I am at the airport waving a little flag, a one-man welcoming committee.’
The Boat People
Philip Gourevitch
‘My grandmother lived in America for forty years before her death, yet she never stopped referring to herself as a refugee.’
The Coral Reef
Tran Vu
'"So, our last night of socialism," Dzung said as he squatted down beside me. I pulled two cigarettes out of my pocket and handed one to him, but didn't reply.'
Saviours
Paul Eggers
'Mr Thanh, originally of Saigon, conducted his camp-wide rat pogrom so thoroughly that the kids were reduced to throwing rocks at each other.'
Savage Winds
Bao Ninh
'The war was almost over. On the other side of the plain, the enemy artillery base lay silent; no reconnaissance plane had yet appeared on the horizon.'
Upriver
Redmond O’Hanlon
'"As far as I can see," announced Lary, "every law of nature is suspended in this goddamn country."'
Gnossienne
Julian Barnes
‘Let me make it clear that I never attend literary conferences. I know that they're held in art deco hotels close to legendary museums; that sessions on the future of the novel are conducted with camaraderie, brio and bonhomie.’
Never Saw Brazil
William Boyd
‘On one of the sunniest of bright May mornings, Senator Dom Liceu Maximiliano Lobo needlessly ran his comb through his neat goatee and ordered his chauffeur to pull into the side of the road.’
The Shore
Richard Ford
'Our relationship, in fact, hasn't seemed to need more attention to theme or direction but has proceeded or at least persisted on autopilot, like a small plane flying out over a peaceful ocean with no one exactly in command.'
The Hole
Romesh Gunesekera
'I let the tears roll down to the sides of my mouth, and licked them to harden my insides. I wanted to cry gushingly, but I couldn't.'
Hemingway in Cuba
Norman Lewis
'I met Ian Fleming at Cape's annual party. Jonathan Cape made no secret of disliking Fleming, had read only the first chapter of Casino Royale and nothing whatever of his subsequent books.'
Shanghai Express
Germaine Greer
'The next dawn broke over an immense stony plain where billions of blue, pink and white plastic bags bobbed like so many tethered pearly balloons.'
Golden Kids Comeback
Timothy Garton Ash
'Hips. Some never have them. Most have them but lose them. A few have them and keep them.'
Rich Rich Rich
Richard Rayner
’I was sweating, I was faint. The yellow on the walls was brilliant and burning.‘
The Trouble with Money
Ian Hamilton
‘Did you know that a hundred-gram jar of Nescafe filled with 1p coins buys two packets of Benson and Hedges?’
Ten Money Notes
Kevin Jackson
‘Despite money's protean nature, however, a lot of people persist in believing that it should stay much the same and are dismayed when it doesn't.’
The Psychology of Money
James Buchan
’In my inferno of solitude, I thought there must be some reason why I was doing what I was doing.‘
Bad Land
Jonathan Raban
‘What the bottom line always comes to is the old two a.m. cry: We can’t go on living like this.’
My Low Korean Master
Chang-rae Lee
’I wondered, too, whether he was suffering inside, whether he sometimes cried, as I did, for reasons unknown.‘
Fat
Helen Epstein
‘Fat Aids has become so common in Uganda, he told us, that if you say you are working on HIV people think you are a thief.’
Playing the Game: The City
David Kynaston
‘It is not a question of how he came to grief, ‘but did he play the game?’’
Playing the Game: The Takeover
Will Hutton
‘The first defender of Hanson-esque capitalism is the Conservative Party.’
