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Emma Bovary’s Eyes
Julian Barnes
‘Her eyes are black: passion and depth. Her eyes are green: wildness and jealousy. Her eyes are brown: reliability and ordinariness. Her eyes are violet: the novel is by Raymond Chandler.‘
Foreign Buddies
Ursula Bentley
‘She had to explain this, and the thought crossed her mind to dwell on this personal note, to put out a feeler to test Christina's reaction to the idea of sexual experiment.’
Extracts From The Journal Of Flying Officer J
William Boyd
‘The squadron left today for the city. The mess cold and sad, Verschoyle, with uncharacteristic generosity, said I could keep the monoplane.’
Rose on the broken
Maggie Gee
‘They're only wild flowers. I wish I could buy you real roses. But to her they became the real roses, frail petals, each centre a sun. And they smelled of sun and beginnings, as clear and thin as the water.’
Obsessions
Alan Judd
‘She responded to him with a mixture of haughty refusal and a suggestive acknowledgement, a grudging yielding which was what the play demanded.’
The Fortune-Teller
Shiva Naipaul
‘While she may have given up counting those broken vows, she had not given up making them.’
Ol’ Black Rock
Philip Norman
‘But here, on a three-legged stool in Tennessee, the tape recorder faltered, as if at the behest of draughts, as if called on to register psychic disturbance.’
The Miraculous Cairn
Christopher Priest
‘The island of Seevl lies like a dark shadow over my memories of childhood.’
The Golden Bough
Salman Rushdie
‘The same face. At every interview the same bland features. It could not be – but it was.’
The Five Of Us
Lisa St Aubin de Terán
‘The freezing of the money signalled the beginning of virtual penury. It also signalled the beginning of our fame.’
Antics
Clive Sinclair
'My nubile companion, assuredly no intellectual, continued to masturbate in front of me.'
