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Spoils

Nadine Gordimer

‘Everyone will be quite safe if they stay in the car and please roll up the windows, says the host.’

How Great Thou Art

Graham Coster

‘At the very end we came upon him – others had seen him from time to time, and reported that he was still out there – and he was bigger even than we had expected.’

Great Falls

Richard Ford

‘This is not a happy story. I warn you.’

A Battle

Patrick Süskind

‘Early one August evening, when most people had already left the park, two men sat confronting one another across a chessboard.’

The Judge’s Wife

Isabel Allende

‘Nicolas Vidal always knew he would lose his head over a woman.’

Menudo

Raymond Carver

‘Vicky says I’m crazy. She said worse things too last night. But who could blame her?’

The Development Game

Leonard Frank

‘We are six on the mission to the North-west Frontier: an old Japanese, a Korean, an American, a Bangladeshi, a Dutch girl, me. ... We've got four weeks to come up with a project for, say, thirty million dollars.’

Empire

Richard Ford

‘Outside on the cold air, flames moved and divided and swarmed the sky. And Sims felt alone in a wide empire, removed and afloat, calmed, as if life was far away now, as if blackness was all around.’

Fast Lanes

Jayne Anne Phillips

‘I was vanished, invisible, another apartment left empty behind me, my possessions given away, thrown away, packed away in taped boxes fit into an available vehicle.’

Fishing with Wussy

Richard Russo

‘Until I was six I thought of my father the way I thought of ‘my heavenly father’, whose existence was a matter of record, but who was, practically speaking, absent and therefore irrelevant.’

Memphis

Ellen Gilchrist

‘He drove off in her car. He was wearing a white visor, a white shirt with long sleeves. I don't believe the world I lived to see.’

The Contas Girl

Robert Olmstead

‘He always felt foolish after he finished making love to the Contas girl. He felt a little piece had been given up of its own will.’

Escapes

Joy Williams

‘We went directly out of the theatre and into the streets, my mother weeping on the little usher's arm.’

Knives

Louise Erdrich

‘It is not so complicated, not even as painful, as I feared, and it doesn't last long either. He signs when it is over, his breath hot and hollow in my ear.’