Extracts & Features

The morning burned so August-hot, the marsh's moist breath hung the oaks and pines with fog.

I am not yet seventeen years of age, but I have a thought that I may be dying.

The air reeked of smoke and burnt flesh.

Great Achilles. Brilliant Achilles, shining Achilles, godlike Achilles . . . How the epithets pile up.

Whenever I woke up, night or day, I’d shuffle through the bright marble foyer of my building and go up the block and around the corner where there was a bodega that never closed.

Chain Night happens once a week on Thursdays.

Jack Reacher caught the last of the summer sun in a small town on the coast of Maine, and then, like the birds in the sky above him, he began his long migration south.

I don’t know what to think. I don’t know what to feel.

If Vera arrives before Harry her whole life will change.

My mom has three freckles, light brown and almost perfectly square, two on her right cheek and one on her nose.

I was sixteen when Sean Kenyon came into my life; he was twenty-two.

I like being the underdog because the only way is up.

Something was not right.

All of this began in October 1978.

The moment I decided to leave him, the moment I thought, enough, we were thirty-five thousand feet above the ocean, hurtling forward but giving the illusion of stillness and tranquility.

The road curves and twists unexpectedly as it leads higher and deeper into the Catskill Mountains, as if the further you get from civilization, the more uncertain the path.

From the moment I accepted the invitation, I was nervous about returning to Germany.

When a baby is born, we say welcome.

Maybe the machine could see the words she never spoke.

October 1955. If Albert Black sings to himself he can almost see himself back home in Belfast, the place where he came from.