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Bachelor Life

M.J. Fitzgerald

‘At nine o’clock the man leaves the flat dressed in an elegant salmon-pink dress’.

Our Lives are Only Lent to Us

Penelope Fitzgerald

‘The two cultures are complementary but in the way that death is to life.’

Interior: Monkeyboy

Patrick Flanery

‘When I sleep, I dream of Will standing on our bed, flicking a whip against our faces. He draws blood.’

White Men’s Boats

Giles Foden

‘Deo Gratias stood on the deck of the Liemba with his prisoners at his feet. I leaned on the rail, studiously casual.’

Room After Room

Jonathan Safran Foer

‘Her heart is kept in a room with a very expensive security system.’

A Scale Model of Gull Point

Kate Folk

Trapped in a revolving restaurant during an American revolution, Shel VanRybroek turns to tin-foil sculpture.

Lake Like a Mirror

Ho Sok Fong

‘If she’d swerved any harder, she would have crashed right into the lake.’ New fiction by Ho Sok Fong, translated from the Chinese by Natascha Bruce.

Winterkill

Richard Ford

‘He’d do anything in the world for something.’

Electric City

Richard Ford

‘No one, I think, thought Great Falls would burn.’

Rock Springs

Richard Ford

‘But as I read on a napkin once, between the idea and the act a whole kingdom lies. And I had a hard time with my acts, which were oftentimes offender's acts.’

The Womanizer

Richard Ford

‘Austin turned up the tiny street – rue Sarrazin – at the head of which he hoped he would come to a larger one, one he knew, rue de Vaugirard, possibly, which he could take all the way to Josephine Belliard's apartment by the Luxembourg Gardens.’

Great Falls

Richard Ford

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

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.’

Overreachers

Richard Ford

‘Madeleine Granville was standing at the hotel window of the Queen Elizabeth II, trying to decide which tiny car far below on Mansfield Street was her yellow Saab’.