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Her Lousy Shoes

Tracy O’Neill

‘On good days, he could believe that that was exactly what he appeared to be: pedestrian, a pedestrian, a walker, walking, going places, on the ups, possessing two healthy feet at least.’

Every Move You Make

David Malouf

‘This is what sorrow is that knows no explanation or answer.’

Lederhosen

Haruki Murakami

‘Please, I beg you. If I do not buy lederhosen now, I will never buy lederhosen.’

Trout Day By Pumpkin Light

Adam Mars-Jones

‘He is as old as sin, if sin is twenty-six.’

Boy, Snow, Bird

Helen Oyeyemi

‘I didn’t enclose a note, though there were a few things I’d have liked to say. Restraint is classier.’

Lily

Ian McEwan

‘He'll be ruthless with himself in his pursuit of boundless health to avoid his mother's fate: Mental death.’

Notes for a Young Gentleman

Toby Litt

‘A gentleman should greet with genuine warmth only the following persons – his sister’s daughters, his maternal aunts and his mortal enemies.’

Kinder Than Solitude

Yiyun Li

‘Being let down was Celia’s fate; life never failed to bestow upon her pain and disappointment she had to suffer on everyone’s behalf, so that the world could go on being a good place, free from real calamities.’

To Detroit

Benjamin Markovits

‘Things started going wrong at my ten-year college reunion – or I guess I mean that I realized how wrong they had gone.’

Soft Core

Joyce Carol Oates

‘They were two sisters of youthful middle age with three breasts between them and a history that might be summed up as much left unsaid. Maggie, the elder, who'd had a mastectomy eighteen months before, rarely alluded to the fact in her younger sister's company and spoke with an air of startled reproach if Esther brought up the subject of her health; as if Maggie's breast cancer were a symptom of a moral weakness, a deficiency of character, about which Esther had no right to know.’

Drinking Men

Todd McEwen

‘Consider a long and famous river; it teems with salmon and story, winds majestic through the most various of Scotland's shires.’

Blue Jay

Lillian Li

‘Like romantic love, you can’t ever replicate your first best-friendship.’

My Heart

Semezdin Mehmedinović

‘Today, it seems, was the day I was meant to die.’ Translated from the Bosnian by Celia Hawkesworth.

Breakfast

Toshiki Okada

‘If I had known she were heading for Tokyo then, and if I had known she thought of Tokyo as a city of zombies, I would have wanted to know, of course, whether she saw me that way, too.’