Extracts & Features

They were young, educated, and both virgins on this, their wedding night, and they lived in a time when a conversation about sexual difficulties was plainly impossible.

The sea was calm the day Soo-min disappeared.

Late for work, Reginald Oren raced across the street, the cobblestones slick from the night’s rain.

And on the Shabbat, the priests would sing a song for the future that is to come, for that day which will be entirely Shabbat and for the repose of eternal life.

Today’s ward round is an eventful one, but it’s nothing out of the ordinary.

‘So, 007 is dead.’

I CAN’T EXPLAIN WHY I did it.

We arrive in this universe through no choice of our own, at a time and place not of our choosing.

Let us begin with what might be considered a paradigmatic example of a bullshit job.

I didn’t always want to be a nurse.

Beatriz knew it was wrong to hate a missionary, but when it came to Marietta, she couldn’t help herself.

My father built the house on Langely Lake for my mother, in the town she grew up in.

NO. I refuse to share this part of my story.

In 1945 our parents went away and left us in the care of two men who may have been criminals.

In Babylon, starlings gaped in the heat, showing dark tongues.

‘This has been the worst week of my life,’ Jen said.

The Emporium opens with the first frost of winter.

Betty Dunlop wasn’t scared of death, but then she hadn’t been scared of the Luftwaffe, the Cold War, the threat of a nuclear winter, salmonella, cholesterol, or any of her three varyingly awful husbands.

The journalist was born in 1964, which is to say she’s seventeen years younger than I am.

Amber brings the coffees over and sets them down with a flourish, gesturing at the intricately piped pattern of white foam that spirals out geometrically.