Extracts

Now that people communicate with one another primarily by social media, letter-writing has become a lost art.

OK. Don’t panic. Don’t panic. I’ve got 5 minutes 52 seconds before my basket expires.

My mother has the tenacity of a bulldog, looks like June Cleaver, and curses like a truck driver.

At the end of 1959, aged fifteen, I sat School Certificate. I required two hundred marks from four subjects to pass, and that’s what I managed. One mark less, and my life might have been entirely different.

Only dead people are allowed to have statues, but I have been given one while still alive. Already I am petrified.

There once lived, at a series of temporary addresses across the United States of America, a travelling man of Indian origin, advancing years and retreating mental powers

I had no inkling of how far my rally career would take me when I was a kid.

Later, when people asked about her travels, Sophie would put it simply: the trip to Europe as a bride was hazy in her memory, but she would never forget the voyage home as a widow.

We typed a hundred words per minute and never missed a syllable.

According to Adam Rogers, writing on www.wired.com, humans are fated to see the same world differently:

Dear Mr Wrexham, I know you don’t know me but please, please, please you have to help me

Late on the afternoon of Tuesday the ninth of April in the Year of Our Risen Lord 1468, a solitary traveller was to be observed picking his way on horseback across the wild moorland...

Well, I’m dying! A lot of men make it to the end of their life and they don’t know they’ve reached it.

It would be inaccurate to say that my childhood was normal before they came.

Water closes over the body. Swallows it. The rocking of the boat subsides quickly.

Something very bad was about to go down.

Let’s be honest, not many people come to Wellington for the weather.

They see the fish on their first day, laid bare on the tideline. The seagulls have nearly picked the bones clean already.

I’m on the highway a few miles out of town when the noise starts: a scraping, grinding din that jackhammers my heart into my stomach.

It was only three days after Colleen had gone missing that anybody told her mother, Muriel Craig, and the news made no sense to her.

So, what are many of the methods out there that promise parents that their defiant children will become accommodating and do as they are told, thus reducing conflict in the house?

A ragged dress was hanging from one branch of a rotting pine tree.

I was born on Ngurambang – can you hear it? – Ngu–ram–bang.

The wind and heavy rain coming right off the sea rattled the cottage windows and pounded on the glass.