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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.’

Stones and Artichokes

Nicole Krauss

‘As we get older, the world grows to fit our fear of death.’

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.‘

Happiness

Andrés Neuman

‘My name is Marcos. I’ve always wanted to be Cristóbal.’

Drone

Hari Kunzru

‘Rich men have been building tall on this hill for centuries.’

House Fire

Yiyun Li

‘The six friends declared war against love outside marriage.’

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.’

The Wrong Square

Neel Mukherjee

‘Something as fundamental to intelligence as counting was eluding him.’

God Bless You, 2011

Hiromi Kawakami

‘If the god of uranium really exists, then what must he be thinking? Were this a fairy tale of old, what would happen when humans broke the laws of nature to turn gods into minions?’ Hiromi Kawakami on the nature gods of Japan.