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Extracts

Extract
Native Son

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.

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The Testaments

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

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Quichotte

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

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Driven: My Story

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

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Where the Light Enters

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.

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The Secrets We Kept

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

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A Conversation with my Country

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

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The Turn of the Key

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

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The Second Sleep

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...

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The Warehouse

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.

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The Family Upstairs

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

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The Nanny

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

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The Inn

Something very bad was about to go down.

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Garage Project: The Art of Beer

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

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Moonlight Sonata

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

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Fake

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.

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Bowraville

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.

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Listen To Me!

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?

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Knife

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

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The Yield

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

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You'll Never See Me Again

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

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Keep You Close

The woman jolts awake, gasping, heart pounding. Gunshots echo in her head, ones conjured in sleep.

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The Whisper Man

Jake. There is so much I want to tell you, but we’ve always found it hard to talk to each other, haven’t we?

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The Oracle

The winter moon lit the paving stones as Gelimer, King of the Vandals, and his brother, Tzazon, galloped their horses through the old triumphal arch, past the theater, past the forum, past the still-elegant sleeping town houses.

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