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Exit Music

Chris Drangle

‘The only sound in the cabin is the droning of the engine.’

The Complaint

Judy Budnitz

‘The first few apartments Claude inspects have the air of people who haven't budged in years.’

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.’

Dragons

Julian Barnes

‘Everything bad came from the north. Whatever else they believed, the whole town, both parts of it, knew that.’

The Brass Bar

Louis de Bernières

‘In the late seventies I was desperately attempting to avoid having a career by doing what I supposed were 'real' jobs.‘

Soon and in Our Days

Naomi Alderman

‘It is not often, even in Hendon, that one witnesses a miracle.’

The Redhead

Roberto Bolaño

‘Only the inventors survive.’

Author, Author

Martin Amis

‘Cities at night, I feel, contain men who cry in their sleep and then say Nothing.’

The Miracle at Ballinspittle

T. Coraghessan Boyle

‘This statue, alone among all the myriad three-foot-high snotgreen likenesses of the Virgin cast in plaster by Finbarr Finnegan & Sons, Cork City, was seen one grim March afternoon some years back to move its limbs ever so slightly, as if seized suddenly by the need of a good sinew-cracking stretch.’

Nostalgia

David Black

‘For a week, the leper had been haunting her. ’

Here Is What You Do

Chris Dennis

‘It’s like there’s a piece of candy hidden deep inside you and everyone is trying to find the easiest way to get it out.’

Loser

Aimee Bender

‘Once there was an orphan who had a knack for finding lost things’.

Night Prayer

Louise Erdrich

‘It was hot and windy in the garden of Our Lady of the Wheat, but inside the convent it was worse.’

Saving the World

Tahmima Anam

‘Today, my brothers, Mohammed and Rubel, are going to foreign.’