Extracts

Jonah Hancock’s counting-house is built wedge-shaped and coffered like a ship’s cabin

I have this secret little vocabulary for my husband.

I stand in the doorway of the twins’ room and watch them sleep, peaceful and innocent, through crib slats that remind me of bars on a prison cell.

There are two kinds of people in the world, those who leave home, and those who don’t.

It’s getting dark, and the little girl is cold.

Kerry Macfarlane has run away from his wedding-that-wasn’t. He lands in coastal Gabriel’s Bay, with hopes to prove he’s not a complete failure.

If you take photographs through a prism, you can turn people into ghosts.

It is nearly dawn, and the semi-darkness casts strange shadows along the footpath.

The girl was found seventy-six hours after she was reported missing.

It’s just another evening of horrors.

The girl’s head rested on a small pile of orange-and-brown leaves.

Their high-pitched squealy calls come first.

According to the statistics, on this last day of the year a man of eighty-five has approximately an 80 per cent chance of reaching 31 December 2015.

The house he’s building is done mostly.

‘What’s your intro, then?’ That’s what my news editor used to ask me as soon as I walked into the office.

A dozen men clad in bright orange coveralls and white hardhats swarmed the decks of CGSL Orion, the 396-meter flagship of China Global Shipping Lines, like ants.

I sit. Waiting. My heart is thumping.

It was the moustache that reminded me I was no longer in England

These days the origin of the universe is explained by proposing a Big Bang, a single event that instantly brought into being all the matter from which everything and everyone are made.

I bounded over the gray, dusty terrain toward the huge dome of Conrad Bubble.

From inside a rambling white Colonial home on a shaded street that smelled of blooming wildflowers, a woman called in a pleasant Southern accent

Jack Reacher and Michelle Chang spent three days in Milwaukee.

My last year of high school, when Kaycee Mitchell and her friends got sick, my father had a bunch of theories.

When you hear the following words, what do you think of? Wagon wheels, Manhattans and run worms.