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The Dune

Stephen King

‘Being able to read obituaries in advance gives a man an extraordinary sense of power.’

Diem Perdidi

Julie Otsuka

‘When you ask her your name, she does not remember what it is.’

A Lovely and Terrible Thing

Chris Womersley

‘For a moment I could not speak. I looked off into the bleak distance, then at this man, and there was something about the sad shake of his head and the way his hair flapped about on his scalp that filled me with unreasonable warmth.’

Vampire

Robert Coover

‘His wife comes in, baring, with a wink, her incisors, and offers him a Bloody Mary.’

Out of the Tombs

Madison Smartt Bell

‘He had always been curious as to what lay behind the gate: a metal portcullis, of an almost medieval aspect, opposite the corner of Columbus Park.’

Auto-Suggestion

Toby Litt

‘I began to think, for no particular reason, about what the exact series of events would be were I to die at that moment – before, even, my coffee went cold.’

Banyan

Robert Olen Butler

‘I wake and it’s dark and a woman is beside me, naked and small, and she is waking too and the room is still heavy with the incense she burned for her dead.’

Gothic Night

Mansoura Ez Eldin

‘He wrote: they called it the city of eternal sun. Its sun set only after the last inhabitant slept, and rose before the first got up. They were all deprived of the night. They were not even aware of its existence.’

An Occupation

Adam Stumacher

‘All those years of manipulating the tuning crank have given him the patience to settle in for these more involved jobs, and patience is perhaps the most important quality in a human shield.’

The Trouble with the Horses

Patrick deWitt

‘We did not believe in naming horses but they were given to us as partial payment for the last job with the names intact, so that was that.’

Redeployment

Phil Klay

‘Those ripples can tear organs apart.’

A Tale of Two Martyrs

Tahar Ben Jelloun

‘You spend your life swallowing insults.’

Crossbones

Nuruddin Farah

‘In a world in which coercion is the norm, a human trafficker must have underlings as well.’

Stones and Artichokes

Nicole Krauss

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