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When the Cholera Came

Lindsey Hilsum

‘It was hard not to wonder if the disease was a kind of divine retribution – collective punishment for a collective crime.’

Abbandonati

Rory Gleeson

‘One day, 200 people’s X-rays showed they needed intensive care in order to survive.’

The Mezzanine, or: The Most Important Book About Nothing You’ll Ever Read

Joel Golby

‘It’s like taking an escalator trip into someone else’s mind for an hour, finding nothing of actual substance up there, and realising, as you retreat mournfully back into your own skull, that there’s nothing there, either.’

Notes on Craft

Ho Sok Fong

‘While writing we recover memories, recover moods, and we start to interpret them.’

The Lye of the Land

Derek Gow

‘One in seven British species is now threatened with extinction. Many more, from the grey wolf to the blue stag beetle, are already long gone.’

Creep

Caoilinn Hughes

‘She hadn’t been skiing since her master’s in Iceland, back when glaciers had some heft to them, though slackened and fast-diminishing as the legs of a retired cyclist.’

The Wolf at the Door

Cal Flyn

‘Wolves brook no bureaucracy. They do not believe in borders. It has been years since we have come face to face with apex predators in our own country.’

The Dragon’s Den

Tim Flannery

‘Just imagine the Australian inland with herds of rhino-sized diprotodon, as well as other gigantic marsupials, being preyed on by marsupial lions and Komodo dragons.’

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.’

Pretty Polly

Shinichi Hoshi

‘Compared to all of you, I’m not the handsomest guy or the smartest, which might’ve caused me all sorts of grief if I was a landlubber. But I spent my life at sea, so I got by.’

Two Poems

Kim Min Jeong

‘You think I like being called Cherry / because your cat’s named Cherry?’

An Unnecessary Man

Maha Harada

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

Tongues of Fire

Seán Hewitt

‘Waking, close to morning but still
a shuttered, metal dark in the room’

Two poems by Seán Hewitt from Tongues of Fire, shortlisted for the 2020 Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year Award.

The Bookmobile

Kotaro Isaka

‘He told me he had quit his job the day after the earthquake and came out here with nothing but a sleeping bag.’