There’s only one thing that could make me agree to dress up like a playboy bunny and parade around half-naked in front of my colleagues and library patrons on a Wednesday night.
On his first night in the house, Mark lies on a mattress in the empty living room with all the windows open and listens to the neighbours beating their son.
When I look back on my career, I keep returning to an image I have of myself as a five-year-old boy, out in the backyard kicking goals.
Don shoved the back door open, banging it hard into the wall. Eve knew by the ferocity of his entrance he was certain to pick a fight with her tonight.
The world is your oyster mushroom. That’s how one top New Zealand chef described the world of edible fungi to me.
I wear my parents’ wedding on my arm. It might seem like an odd thing to do — getting this event memorialised in ink on my left forearm — because they have been divorced since I was three years old.
Here you are: a novel. From my fingers to your hand, from my eye to your eye, from the crevices of my crumpled brain to the crevices of yours.
Laughter. I must be less than two years old (I remember the nappy), standing in a kitchen cupboard that reaches from the bench right to the ceiling.
Rainbow Valley is on the way up Mount Everest, about five hundred metres from the top and patched with bright colours rarely seen in nature.
Three girls dance in front of him. One of them has set up an old stereo, and tinny music blares, blocking out the sound of the cicadas that sing relentlessly at this time in the evening.
When would it stop? They’d said nothing about lingering pain, but these cramps forced her to hold her breath and count through them when they came; they were like something too big trying to squeeze through a small hole.
In the pale twilight of an Arctic summer night, three men ran for their lives through an endless sea of knee-high shrubs and scrub grass.
I never really wanted to be a police officer. Thick flakes of white drift down from a low, grey sky, adding their weight to the drooping branches of beech trees.
AT DAWN THAT morning, a man dressed entirely in black nosed his gray Ford sedan up to the curb on Taylor Street.
A watch alarm was beeping. Someone was being sick. Loudly, close by. Several people were sprawled at odd, impossible angles over the uprooted coach seats.
MY LIFE FELT like a dream. I guess that happens when you elope, hop on a plane, drift off to sleep, and wake up in a foreign country.
He looks up. A square jaw, narrow waist, messy golden hair pushed up off his forehead, except for one lock which falls across his brow the second our eyes meet.
I CHOOSE TO BE EXHILARATED by the gift of failure. I say choose because it is a choice, just like any other choice you make in life.
It wasn’t the first time Evan had drunk vodka atop a glacier. But it was the first time he’d traveled to a glacier with the express purpose of drinking vodka.