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The Summer After the War

Kazuo Ishiguro

‘As it was, my grandfather began helping me to paint without my having to ask him.’

Evensong

Todd McEwen

‘Characteristically my wife refused to be drawn into the situation while I became obsessed with it.’

The Little Winter

Joy Williams

‘She remembered being happy off and on that day, and then looking at things and finding it all unkind.’

At Yankee Stadium

Don DeLillo

‘From a series of linked couples they become one continuous wave, larger all the time.’

Agnes of Iowa

Lorrie Moore

‘Through college she had been a feminist – more or less. She shaved her legs, but just not often enough, she liked to say.’

Nadine at Forty

Hilary Mantel

‘Each day we re-enact, on ourselves, what was done to us.’

The Dreadful Mucamas

Lydia Davis

‘We do not believe they are sincerely trying to please us.’

Always the Same Snow and Always the Same Uncle

Herta Müller

‘Who knows: what I write I must eat, what I don’t write – eats me.’

A Man’s Life

Pajtim Statovci

‘I wished my family would die, my friends too, everybody I knew, because only that way could they never follow me wherever I went.’

My Enemy’s Cherry Tree

Wang Ting-Kuo

‘And the truth is, my heart was tied in knots, and pain bored into the marrow of my bones when I heard about his illness.’

Oval

Elvia Wilk

‘We’re trying to prove that it’s possible to live sustainably and not be such a freak about it.’

Our Agent At Dawn

Nina Ellis

‘After I kill him I’ll go to Graceland.’

Maid Marian

Lisa Taddeo

‘It had taken Noni many years to stop wishing she’d been a woman like that.’

A Mother’s Dilemma

Victor Lodato

‘I can hear the girl scratching a pencil inside a notebook. I don’t like it. I’ve asked her not to write about me.’