Extracts & Features

Jake. There is so much I want to tell you, but we’ve always found it hard to talk to each other, haven’t we?

I am neither evil nor deranged. I am not uneducated, I am not poor, and I am not the product of an abusive upbringing. I do what I do for one, and only one, reason.

This is what happened.

The winter moon lit the paving stones as Gelimer, King of the Vandals, and his brother, Tzazon, galloped their horses through the old triumphal arch, past the theater, past the forum, past the still-elegant sleeping town houses.

He was a Scorpion. First Ensign Salvio was never more proud of that fact than now. He checked his watch.

A few years ago, I had a unique experience that became the inspiration for the concept and title of this book.

It’s a sit-and-wait job.

The sultan wasn’t sure what woke him up.

July 1973 Francis Gleeson, tall and thin in his powder blue policeman’s uniform, stepped out of the sun and into the shadow of the stocky stone building that was the station house of the Forty-First Precinct.

The posts on the Stuart Highway were white with round, red reflectors attached at the top.

Catawampus. A word I’ve decided to take a real shine to in my old age.

Kate was sleeping when he knocked on her door.

Maja is thirty-seven weeks pregnant.

Beth leaned against a fence post and looked across the red dirt paddock, puffing.

Reality is water-soluble.

A woman came to the barn today. Her hair was the colour of walnut wood. Her eyes were the colour of bracken in October.

Sarah smiled to herself as two more bottles of wine were ordered. Some of the school mothers were getting very loose-tongued and it was extremely entertaining.

I wake with a start. Been dreaming. Dreaming bout a light that shine bright, strong, hot, even though all round is a cool, shadowy darkness.

The fall had turned to winter and then back again without conviction, November’s chill taken up and dropped like a woman never wearing the right coat until finally December laughed and took hold.

In a little school surrounded by farmland, far away from any town...