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Five Houses
Melanie McFadyean
‘I live here, we say, this is my house, my home. We settle, dwell, adorn. A house feels permanent. But this illusion of security can end in a minute.’
Small Differences
Catherine Lacey
‘Everyone should just sit very still until they reach the calmer waters of later-young-adulthood, that promised land of lowered expectations.’
A Clean Marriage
Sayaka Murata
‘Frequency of sex since marriage: zero.’ Sayaka Murata on a sexless marriage and the ‘Clean Breeder’ technique for pleasureless reproduction.
Mouth
Mario Vargas Llosa
‘I lost my left ear from a bite. . .Through the thin slit that remains I can hear the sounds of the world.’
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.’
Five Cats and Three Women
J. Robert Lennon
‘While he didn't mind (not much anyway) being responsible for the death of one cat, his cat, he did not feel good shouldering the death of four cats.’
Reference Points
Philip Kerr
‘It was eating oysters, four hundred of the bivalve sons-of-bitches, that finally killed my father, in a theatre-bar off St Martin's Lane.‘
Motorama 1954
Bill Morris
‘It was at sundown on New Year's Day 1954 that Claire Hathaway began to feel embarrassed by her new television set.’