Extracts & Features

The secretary is the most dangerous person in the room.

The child is dead. There is nothing left to know.

In the beginning we were a single pluripotent embryo that was so burst-full of genetic potential it considered becoming two embryos and then part way through this most delicate of processes, changed its mind.

All families are secret societies. Realms of intrigue and internal warfare, governed by their own rules, regulations, boundaries, frontiers. Rules which often make no sense to those outside its borders.

“GIMME TWO scoops, three waddles, and a shake!”

The trouble with me is, I can’t let things go.

A man melted into the throng of tourists gathered along the E Street walkway.

No Regrets. Stupid name for a signature cocktail. Brears had found the recipe online, this tequila-Baileys thing.

My mother kept bees: Apis mellifera ligustica, the Ligurian bee, which exists in its purest strain here on Kangaroo Island.

The field is full of flowers. None of those words is a lie, but they’re not true either, because they’re too small, too inadequate, too little to describe the field, its fullness, the flowers.

Alessia opens the door but freezes on the threshold of the room.

Diary of a Wimpy Kid world to expand in April 2019 with new book: DIARY OF AN AWESOME FRIENDLY KID

It’s rained for forty days and forty nights, so when a guy who looks like Jesus in orange SES overalls comes to stand next to her, Rosie thinks it’s all a bit biblical.

So here’s how it is: I’m a live-in carer for Walter Smyth. He is very rich, very old, very sick and very senile. Over the next eight years, dozens of people will occupy this role.

“Hurry,” I heard someone say. “He’s losing a lot of blood.”

It should have been the greatest day of his life.

She made her skittering, sliding way down the riverbank. Her trainers hit the flat ground at the lip of the water, and she wobbled but recovered.

The call comes at 3 a.m. The jagged ring of the bedside telephone tearing a hole in our sleep. I reach out a hand to silence it.

The real trouble came at midnight.

Everyone is staring at me.