Explore fiction
The Seventh Man
Haruki Murakami
‘I looked up at the sky. A few grey cotton chunks of cloud hung there, motionless.’
Runs Girl | New Voices
Chinelo Okparanta
‘The year Mama fell sick was the year Njideka confessed to me that she was a runs girl.’
Remission
Adam Mars-Jones
‘There's an awkward interval, when you're ill but not yet conditioned by illness.’
The Dune
Stephen King
‘Being able to read obituaries in advance gives a man an extraordinary sense of power.’
Accident
Etgar Keret
’Thirty years I’m a cabbie,’ the small guy sitting behind the wheel tells me, ’thirty years and not one accident.’
The Bridge
David Mamet
‘Surely the world was going to end. And probably in fire - in nuclear destruction, by mistake, or at the hands of madmen.’
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.’
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.’
Mouth
Mario Vargas Llosa
‘I lost my left ear from a bite. . .Through the thin slit that remains I can hear the sounds of the world.’
Agnes of Iowa
Lorrie Moore
‘Her mother had given her the name Agnes, believing that a good-looking woman was even more striking when her name was a homely one.’
The Whale House
Sharon Millar
‘By morning the dreams are gone, flying through the tiny holes in the net in sudden starling movements.’
Five Houses
Melanie McFadyean
‘I live here, we say, this is my house, my home. We settle, dwell, adorn. A house feels permanent. But this illusion of security can end in a minute.’
OIF
Phil Klay
‘A few months later I was strapped up, M4 in condition 1, surrounded by 03s, backpack full of cash, twitchiest guy in Iraq.’
Soul and Body
Milan Kundera
‘What was screaming in fact was the naive idealism of her love trying to banish all contradictions, banish the duality of the body and soul, banish perhaps even time.’
Boy, Snow, Bird
Helen Oyeyemi
‘I didn’t enclose a note, though there were a few things I’d have liked to say. Restraint is classier.’
Soft Core
Joyce Carol Oates
‘They were two sisters of youthful middle age with three breasts between them and a history that might be summed up as much left unsaid. Maggie, the elder, who'd had a mastectomy eighteen months before, rarely alluded to the fact in her younger sister's company and spoke with an air of startled reproach if Esther brought up the subject of her health; as if Maggie's breast cancer were a symptom of a moral weakness, a deficiency of character, about which Esther had no right to know.’
Two Girls in a Boat
Emma Martin
‘This was a tiredness that caused Hannah to walk into a travel agent in Clapham High Street on a grey Tuesday morning and buy a ticket to New Zealand.’
Motorama 1954
Bill Morris
‘It was at sundown on New Year's Day 1954 that Claire Hathaway began to feel embarrassed by her new television set.’
The Great Wall
Ismail Kadaré
‘They've been making every imaginable special case for him for all eternity, they even sing hymns in his honour’.
Whale
Panos Karnezis
‘Whale arrived at work a little after seven with black circles round his eyes’.
Crossing Cut Creek | New Voices
Erin McMillan
‘Light rose over Mama’s tanned arms, Keller’s dirty hair. The air was thick with colour and swirling dust, and we were still, suspended in it.’
Reference Points
Philip Kerr
‘It was eating oysters, four hundred of the bivalve sons-of-bitches, that finally killed my father, in a theatre-bar off St Martin's Lane.‘
Notes for a Young Gentleman
Toby Litt
‘A gentleman should greet with genuine warmth only the following persons – his sister’s daughters, his maternal aunts and his mortal enemies.’
