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A/S/L

Emma Cline

‘It was the afternoons that did it, three o’clock like a kind of death knell, the house seeming too still, too many hours of sunlight left in the day. How had Thora even started going to the chat rooms?’

In the Beginning

Diane Cook

‘They flavored their early stews with bacon. None of that stuff lasted long, though. That first day felt like a vacation in a wondrous new place. That feeling didn’t last long either.’

Gospel

Carys Davies

‘I would explain to you then, if I could, the theory that in the case of hairline shape, there are two possible variants or alleles: straight, or widow’s peak.’

Learning to Sing

Lydia Davis

‘You discover during your very first lessons that the problem of singing better involves overcoming many other problems you had not ever imagined.’

Sleeping Beauty

Laura Demers

‘It’s normal not to be offered anything to eat or drink when you are a princess.’

Exciting Times

Naoise Dolan

‘There was something Shakespearean about imperious men going down on you: the mighty have fallen.’

Naoise Dolan’s Exciting Times is shortlisted for the 2020 Young Writer of the Year Award.

Burnt Sugar

Avni Doshi

‘I would be lying if I said my mother’s misery has never given me pleasure.’

Capitán

Magalí Etchebarne

‘A man, my mother once told me, is a small animal that looks immense.’

The Young Entrepreneurs of Miss Bristol’s Front Porch

Sidik Fofana

‘Every black girl on my block was waitin to get a look at Kandese when she first come for the summer. Her grandmuhva told us she hit a teacher with a ruler and got kicked out of her school in Harlem.’

Fiction by Sidik Fofana.

It Was a Dog

Amaryllis Gacioppo

‘She liked to eat until her thighs felt gelatinous and slick with sweat, and her stomach ballooned out, sore and firm as though she had drunk cement that had now set.’

The High House

Jessie Greengrass

‘All those who might have lived instead of us are gone, or they are starving, while we stay on here at the high house, pulling potatoes from soft earth.’

The Temptation of St Anthony

Mark Haddon

‘He had not eaten today nor had he drunk. He would wait until the craving had passed, then allow himself to do both when it became a choice, not a lost battle in his long war against the base needs of the body.’

An Unnecessary Man

Maha Harada

‘I’d lived for half a century, but I had no sense of what that meant; no particular reaction.’

‘Doe Lea’

M. John Harrison

‘He was already suffering the attacks that would characterise the later stages of the illness, during which lights seemed to dance on the surface of everything. They were blue, lilac, pink and green, he said.’