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Gift for a Sweetheart
Isabel Allende
‘Horacio Fortunato was forty-six when the languid Jewish woman who was to change his roguish ways and deflate his fanfaronade entered his life.’
A House in the Country
Romesh Gunesekera
‘The nights had always been noisy: frogs, drums, bottles, dogs barking at the moon.’
Time’s Arrow
Martin Amis
‘I came rushing upward out of the blackest sleep to find myself surrounded by doctors.’
Isis in Darkness
Margaret Atwood
‘The lock splits. The iron gate swings open. She emerges, raises her arms towards the suddenly chilled moon. The world changes.’
Electric City
Richard Ford
‘No one, I think, thought Great Falls would burn.’
Fiction by Richard Ford.
New World (Part Three)
Jonathan Raban
‘To my eyes, airplane always looked impertinently casual on the page; it robbed the amazing machine of its proper mystery.’
On a Boat to Tangier
Tahar Ben Jelloun
‘He inspected the chest where the snakes slept. There was the viper, quiet, in a deep sleep.’
Centre of Gravity
Victoria Tokareva
‘For reasons I don’t want to go into, I decided to commit suicide.’
Our Circle
Ludmilla Petrushevskaya
‘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.’
The Siege of Leningrad
Mikhail Steblin-Kamensky
‘Alexander Ivanovich woke at six, the hour when radio broadcasting would normally have begun, but the radio had been silent for a month now.’
Democracy
Joseph Brodsky
‘Nothing, really, Petrovich. That Georgian, you know, that foreign minister of theirs, says that half an hour ago, Himself announced at a press conference that democracy is being introduced here.’
New World (Part Two)
Jonathan Raban
‘It was how Europeans had always seen American nature – as shockingly bigger, more colourful, more deadly, more exotic, than anything they’d seen at home.’
