Extracts & Features

So, what are many of the methods out there that promise parents that their defiant children will become accommodating and do as they are told, thus reducing conflict in the house?

The twenty-year-old Lyra has to flee Oxford by boat for the third time in her life, this time in the company of the old gyptian Giorgio Brabandt.

Jake. There is so much I want to tell you, but we’ve always found it hard to talk to each other, haven’t we?

I am neither evil nor deranged. I am not uneducated, I am not poor, and I am not the product of an abusive upbringing. I do what I do for one, and only one, reason.

The winter moon lit the paving stones as Gelimer, King of the Vandals, and his brother, Tzazon, galloped their horses through the old triumphal arch, past the theater, past the forum, past the still-elegant sleeping town houses.

He was a Scorpion. First Ensign Salvio was never more proud of that fact than now. He checked his watch.

July 1973 Francis Gleeson, tall and thin in his powder blue policeman’s uniform, stepped out of the sun and into the shadow of the stocky stone building that was the station house of the Forty-First Precinct.

Maja is thirty-seven weeks pregnant.

Reality is water-soluble.

A woman came to the barn today. Her hair was the colour of walnut wood. Her eyes were the colour of bracken in October.

I stood behind the door and rattled its handle, even though I knew you needed a key to get in or out and I didn’t have one.

The fall had turned to winter and then back again without conviction, November’s chill taken up and dropped like a woman never wearing the right coat until finally December laughed and took hold.

Long ago, on a late summer’s day, strange creatures came over the mountain.

Two men talking in the middle of the night. They are 1,040 miles apart.

Oblivious to the golden morning awakening around her, the chorus of birdsong and the heckling of kookaburras in the ghost gums, Maggie swam laps of the pool.

Someone tries to kill me at least once a day.

There was one other Arab onboard the ship to Marseille. His name was Faruq al-Azmeh, and the day after leaving port in Alexandria he approached Midhat at breakfast, with a plate of toast in one hand and a string of amber prayer beads in the other.

I never would have done what they say I’ve done, to Madame, because I loved her. Yet they say I must be put to death for it, and they want me to confess. But how can I confess what I don’t believe I’ve done?

It was religious yearning granted hope, it was the holy grail of science. Our ambitions ran high and low – for a creation myth made real, for a monstrous act of self-love.

“We’ve found a house for you, sir.”