Extracts

It was a wild and lightning-struck night.

She’d created a little altar on the chest of drawers in her bedroom

Tokyo Station is packed. It’s been a while since Yuichi Kimura was here last, so he isn’t sure if it’s always this crowded.

When people say ‘terminal’, I think of the airport.

A stir moves through the Pride House Group Home, and seconds later adolescent faces pig against the muggy front window.

My best friend, a seasoned homicide detective, is a master of discontent.

It turns out the place we stopped for the night was a public park.

A slap. A cry. Distress, which seems a poor enough start to things.

Your house glows at night like everything inside is on fire.

Twig dolls peculiar to the small Sussex village of Chapel Croft.

I’m late for dinner again, but this time it’s not my fault. There’s a mansplainer in my way.

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.

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

‘Normal is a cycle on a washing machine’ is something my dad always told me.

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.