Extracts

'Barry was an awesome dad to many children, just not his own.'

Yes, quite a lot of people do ask me how I lost the little finger of my left hand.

Do you remember when I was a hero, Eddy? Back when everyone thought I saved you, before my face looked like a broken dinner plate.

Alice Kent turned up the volume on her car radio as Eric Clapton, playing her favourite number, ‘Layla’, came on.

I stare down at the young man who stands below me ankle-deep in the mud of the banks of the Thames.

We’d been driving for about seven thousand years. Or at least that’s how it felt.

One morning in March 2014, I woke up and wondered just how the hell I’d got here. I was sleeping on a mattress on the floor of a one-room sleep-out at a community home in South Auckland, with rapists and drug addicts as my neighbours.

 To'asavili was dreaming of cows swimming under the sea.

I was arrested in Eno’s diner. At twelve o’clock. I was eating eggs and drinking coffee.

Charlie’s ugly Crocs stuck to the mats on the floor behind the bar, making a sticky, squelching sound.

Jun Chu stood on the deck of a three-masted junk given the auspicious name Silken Dragon.

Cristabel picks up the stick. It fits well in her hand. She is in the garden, waiting with the rest of the household for her father to return with her new mother.

The death of Admiral Sir Miles Messervy, known to some as ‘M’, had been announced to a largely uninterested world a few days before.

In darkness, the trireme struck the beach at the speed of a running man, knifing through shingle in a hissing roar. A second followed, almost the shadow of the first. One after the other, they came to a halt and leaned.

Eddie had been the only one not to leave Lake Matariki.

They chose Valentine’s Day 2005 as the date to release the engagement news and Camilla’s new title of HRH The Duchess of Cornwall bestowed by the Queen.

Cindy Thomas was working at the dining table she’d bought at a tag sale down the block.