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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.’
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.’
A Short History of Coronation Ale
Graham Swift
‘Rest assured, it was no ordinary ale that they drank by the Ouse while in Westminster crowds thronged.’
Beginning, End | New Voices
Jessica Soffer
‘I walked behind you. You led the rallies. I lost my mother. You rubbed my back.’
Keepers Of The House
Lisa St Aubin de Terán
‘Lydia Sinclair was just seventeen when she arrived on her husband's estate in the Andes.’ Lisa St Aubin de Terán's fictional memoir.
Preserves for Life
Olga Tokarczuk
‘He came upon one under the kitchen sink labelled ‘Shoestrings in vinegar, 2004’, and that should have alarmed him.’
New World (Part One)
Jonathan Raban
‘At first sight the ship was bigger than the dock in which it floated, a whale sprawled in a hip-bath‘.
Jill
Darcey Steinke
‘I had a new persona I’d been planning to introduce the first day of school: a girl wise beyond her years who was not at all nerdy or spastic or prone to crying jags.’
