Extracts

I began writing this book shortly after the end of my presidency—after Michelle and I had boarded Air Force One for the last time and traveled west for a long-deferred break.

Most morning, my husband, Doug, wakes up before me and reads the news in bed.

The night she died, all our phones were turned off.

Twenty-Five years ago, Sam Neill wrote the introduction to this book’s predecessor, Timeless Land.

Some believe that at the beginning there was nothing.

Aroha mai, aroha atu.

As I reach for the doorbell, my phone bleeps with a text and my head instantly fills with a roll call of possibilities.

DEVON MONROE TORE HIS EYES off the two dead bodies in the powder-blue Bentley convertible, top down, idling not twenty yards away, and glanced at his best friend.

I open my eyes and I am tangled in the sheets, books upside down on the floor.

As the new year of 1910 moved closer to its second month, the world marvelled that there had been so few deaths in Paris when the River Seine rose more than eight metres and flooded the city.

The sickle moon had just slipped below the western horizon when the file of mounted men emerged from the trees.

The decision to begin my world trip in Australia was an easy one.

I would be lying if I said my mother’s misery has never given me pleasure.

On the day I was born, 3rd August 1986, ‘The Edge of Heaven’ by Wham! was number one.

Where will you be when your life ends?

Try to imagine two more different couples than these. You can’t.

Pripyat in the Ukraine is a place unlike anywhere else I have been. It is a place of utter despair.

It all began with Mallory’s tooth.