‘Sometimes she lied. She didn’t do it maliciously; she did it to pass the time.’
‘Here I stand on Observation Hill. If the Devil made me an offer at this moment, I feel sure I would accept.’
‘After a while people’s faces began to fade, and they came to seem like hoards of noppera-bō, faceless spirits gliding by.’ Two stories by Tomoka Shibasaki.
‘I am afraid that my memory is confused about these events, the final events of my life, by which I mean what happened before I started to go blind.’
‘Frank Randall had three sons: Michael, Eddy and Mark. That was fine by him‘.
‘My brother and I can’t help but stand out in such a gritty locale.’
This is an excerpt from Painter to the King, Amy Sackville's account of the life of Diego Velázquez. Now available from Granta Books.
‘A single pod of cardamom! Was that enough? To flavour an entire life’s pot of time?’
‘Something’s out there. Something has shown up in the woods of Highland City.’
‘They were all perpetually cowed by their own brutality, quivering and defeated by the measures they were forced to enact.’
‘A perfect impostor.’
‘Sorting out the world! He should have sorted out himself and his own jeopardized household.’
“I’m looking for my daughter’s imaginary friends and you’d better bloody well believe it, mate!”
‘I put the breast milk in the fridge and lie down on the bed. I pretend I am dead, underneath the earth with a bag of Cheetos.’
