He was a baby once, she thought. New and perfect, cradled in his mother’s arms. The mysterious Sylvie. Now he was a feathery husk, ready to blow away. His eyes were half open, milky, like an old dog,...
He wanted to be deafened by the thunder of her engines, he needed to be drained of every thought by the cold, the noise, the equal amounts of boredom and adrenalin. He had believed once that he would...
He preferred solitary pursuits, and being a member of a group seemed rather dutiful, but he could do dutiful and somebody had to or the world would fall apart.
Get down,' Bunty says grimly. 'Mummy's thinking.' (Although what Mummy's actually doing is wondering what it would be like if her entire family was wiped out and she could start again.)
Dr. Kellet himself wore a three-piece Harris tweed suit strung with a large gold fob watch. He smelled of cloves and pipe tobacco and had a twinkly look about him as if he were going to toast muffins...
Don't you wonder sometimes,' Ursula said. 'If just one small thing had been changed, in the past, I mean. If Hitler had died at birth, or if someone had kidnapped him as a baby and brought him up in--...
A coincidence is just an explanation waiting to happen
You walk into a room and your life ends but you keep on living.
White lilies, the kind you would give to a bride or a corpse.
That one way or another the Germans were tracking them from the
Strangers? Millie’s swan song on the stage, the last
Quoting Elizabeth I. Do not tell secrets to those whose faith and silence you have not already tested.
When she was little they had lived in an old farmhouse too, in the middle of nothing of but landscape.
When Lillian left work in the early evening the streets were slick and shiny with rain and the lamps flared yellow giving her the melancholy feeling that always came with the rain and the dark. She’d...
Whatever happens to you, embrace it, the good and the bad equally.
Well, we all get on,’ Sylvie said, ‘one way or another. And in the end we all arrive at the same place. I hardly see that it matters how we get there.’ It
Ursula had grown rather callous about George Glover’s lungs, she had heard so much of them that they seemed to have a life of their own, rather like Sylvie’s mother’s lungs, organs that seemed to have...
Twittering just seemed to be people telling other people what they were doing--getting in the shower, making coffee. Who on earth wanted to know these things?...Babble and twitter. Full of sound and f...
They were both Filipino and laughed no matter what you said. Were the Philippines really such a happy place or were the carers just happy not to be there?
There was always a second before the siren started when she was aware of a sound as yet unheard. It was like an echo, or rather the opposite of an echo. An echo came afterwards, but was there a word f...