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Tomorrow

Joanna Kavenna

‘She was living as herself, in herself, without ever thinking about what that meant.’

Late in Life

A.L. Kennedy

‘Eating figs is different for girls.’

The Captain

Rattawut Lapcharoensap

‘I was with Dora. We were in love. Things were cheap and plentiful and the money from the insurance was going to last us forever.’

Amateur Dramatics

Jonathan Lee

‘I heard the news from a nurse with a piece of tinsel tied around her waist: my father had become a hypochondriac.’

Blue Jay

Lillian Li

‘Like romantic love, you can’t ever replicate your first best-friendship.’

From Dream to Dream

Yiyun Li

‘At what point had one’s life stopped belonging to one?’

Success

Adriana Lisboa

‘They hadn’t tried them yet but the girls both knew, from the adverts, that Hollywood cigarettes were awesome.’

The Quality of the Affection

Lloyd Lynford

‘What thou lovest well cannot be reft from thee. But maybe Ezra was mistaken, maybe it can be reft, but maybe that was her fault.’

Tombouctou

Jamal Mahjoub

‘After about three days in Djenné the lizards begin to talk.’

The Loyalty Protocol

Ben Marcus

‘The tally, indeed, on that particular activity, in that particular location – or, in fact, on any couch ever – was, indeed, zero.’

You Don’t Have To Live Like This

Benjamin Markovits

‘It felt like everything that had happened to me in college, everything I had learned to be comfortable with, had produced this jerk standing naked in the water, splashing his best friend’s girlfriend in the chest.’

Crow Fair

Thomas McGuane

‘You’re in a different world when your own mother doesn’t recognize you, or thinks you’re the stranger who gave her a hickey.’

Things with faces

Zoë Meager

‘This is all you remember. The sound of her pacing the house at night.’

The Sarong-Man in the Old House, and an Incubus for a Rainy Night

Michael Mendis

‘I say his fingers are dying because he is old. Because he is and alone. On that sloping armchair. But more because there is no turning back for him.’