Extracts

Sujin is hell-bent on becoming a room salon girl.

The two suspects sat on mismatched furniture in the white and almost featureless lounge, waiting for something to happen.

I duck down and pull my hoodie close around my face.

The Polydorus is a charming family-run hotel, located a short walk away from the lively town of Agios Nikolaos, one hour from Heraklion.

The dust of mountain flowers lay thick on the air, like perfume or boiled varnish.

It is a surprisingly hot Easter Sunday when I begin writing this book.

The shoes were a big mistake. Her toes had gone numb and every time a stiletto heel crunched on to the unforgiving surface of the pavement, it set her teeth on edge.

When Margery was ten, she fell in love with a beetle.

On the night that I was born, my father, Marinus, left our home while my mother was in labour and, over the eight hours that followed, slaughtered a dozen infant boys, the sons of our neighbours and friends, each one under the age of two years.

It was my mother who took me to the police station.

Barnaby Lewis crouched down on the bank and cupped his hands into the sludgy pool at the bottom of the near-empty dam.

Stephen McDakeldy, sixty-five years old, lover of poetry and Jesus, was crouched on all fours between a eucalyptus tree and a hedge of gorse in the furthest corner of Waikumete Cemetery.

The agent, unlike the soldier, who has many friends, is surrounded by enemies, seen and unseen.

Two summers ago, my wife and I took our daughters to the zoo.

That was the order. Jack got it. Rijk van Delden—if that was his real name—was the only link between the Iron Syndicate and the nameless merc outfit the syndicate hired for their dirtiest hits.

BIGFOOT DESTROYS TOWN. That was the title of an article I received not long after the Mount Rainier eruption

I was born with a heart three sizes too big.

Rusty Rutherford emerged from his apartment on a Monday morning, exactly one week after he got fired.

To speak about the meaning and value of life may seem more necessary today (1946) than ever; the question is only whether and how this is ‘possible’.

HERE ARE SOME BASIC FACTS: Women live longer than men. Women have stronger immune systems.

The frail old man wakes screaming, tangled in an American flag—the same one that draped the coffin of his slain son, President John Fitzgerald Kennedy, three days after his November 22, 1963, assassination.

Once upon a time there was a woman who discovered she had turned into the wrong person . . . That’s me, by the way.

His name was Raymond Stirling, but to his family and friends he was known as ‘Curly’.

Drawing herself up from a deep tide of consciousness, Edith opened her eyes.