Extracts & Features

 “You have four kinds of sparkling water,” Mia reports from the depths of our refrigerator.

To get to the tiny village of Kittredge, Colorado, which for five days in 1987 became the unlikely center of the political solar system, you have to take the interstate about ten miles west of Denver

Even the most perfect life can shatter in seconds, and Brook Connor’s nightmare began approximately two minutes after she walked through her front door.

On the way home from the hospital, she asked him if he wanted her to stay.

In Mother Russia, secrets did not stay secret for long.

She wasn’t beautiful, and she was of course perfectly aware of it.

Twenty-one minutes before the ambush, Harrison Tucker is lying on his stomach on a king-size bed in an Atlanta hotel room

There was once an inn that sat peacefully on the bank of the Thames at Radcot, a long day’s walk from the source.

In the middle of the journey of my life I found myself inside a tent of mirrors.

So, you’ve finished reading Up the Duff: The Real Guide to Pregnancy, and now you’ve thrown it at the wall and you’re shouting ‘Yes, but what do I do now the bloody baby has arrived, you dreadful slattern?!’

When I was a kid, my aspirations were simple. I wanted a dog. I wanted a house that had stairs in it— two floors for one family.

Picture a fairytale’s engraving. Straight black trees stretching in perfect symmetry to their vanishing point, the ground covered in thick white snow.

Usually, I enjoy visiting film sets.

At the time of the discovery of the astonishingly ancient Learned Man, some decades back, my friend Peter Jorgensen, a scientist from Melbourne, was testing dried lake basins and their sediments for records of ancient rainfall oscillations.

I’ve always considered myself to be, basically, a lucky person.

London. Trinity term one week old. Implacable June weather.

Temperatures that late January morning plunged to four degrees above zero, and still people came by the hundreds of thousands, packing both sides of the procession route from Capitol Hill to the White House.

David Ben-Avi walked along a trail on the rocky, windswept island of Jaros.

It’s a wonder everyone who uses public transport in winter doesn’t keel over and die of germ overload.

So many people ask me, with love and kindness in their hearts, “What has been your proudest moment, Ziauddin?”