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The Liar

James Tadd Adcox

‘I remember the first time I lied. It may be my earliest memory.’

The Ferryman

Azam Ahmed

‘I do not do this work for the government, or the Taliban, or even the men who I collect from the battlefield and return to their loved ones. All these years I have done this for God.’

Lucia Series

Jesse Ball

‘People love to say it to you like it counts: Oh, Lucia, she will live on in your memory.’

The Visitor

Colin Barrett

‘The dog was some sort of overbred weedling with a ribcage fine-boned as a chicken’s, a wizened rat’s face and a goony, perpetually bloodshot stare that made Dev Hendrick want to punt the thing over the garden gate.’

Green, Mud, Gold

Sara Baume

‘She shuts her eyes and pictures ears growing out through her ears, her spine turning to wood, pictures herself as a girl-woman scarecrow, arms opened wide, and nailed to two posts in the centre of a great green, mud and gold expanse, crucified.’

The Disappearing

Fatima Bhutto

‘I have gone to the forest to lie among the moss and sleep under a canopy of trees. I have gone to the forest to root among the soil and listen to the birds.’

Wendy

Ka Bradley

‘Nathan: there’s something in the basement. In the locked rooms I was telling you about.’

Our Last Guest

Rowan Hisayo Buchanan

‘Maybe anyone becomes unbearable after enough time in the honeymoon suite.’ Rowan Hisayo Buchanan’s story of eternity á deux.

His Middle Name Was Not Jesus

NoViolet Bulawayo

‘He didn’t know their language but understood it in their boiling voices, the heat on their faces, how they singed each other with their eyes.’

Here We Are

Lucy Caldwell

‘‘Here we are,’ she said, as we faced each other, and my whole body rushed with goosebumps.’

Base Life

George Makana Clark

‘This is why he will survive this war to return to his wife and daughter, barring a blind bullet, an errant piece of shrapnel, some careless act of destiny.’

Arcadia

Emma Cline

‘Could a place work on you like an illness?’

The Threshold

Oliverio Coelho

‘In the not-too-distant future, all men would be on their feet, reduced to wearing out their soles on the streets.’

Whatever Happened to Interracial Love?

Kathleen Collins

‘It’s the year of “the human being”. The year of race-creed-color blindness. It’s 1963.’