Extracts & Features

The stench of horse manure woke Max Einstein with a jolt.

I push my boot against the gas pedal, and the needle on the speedometer surges past one hundred miles an hour.

Brunetti found himself seated towards the rear of a Number One vaporetto, glancing idly through a copy of that morning’s Gazzettino.

There were only four words beneath the tattoo of the Grim Reaper on Aubrey Davenport’s inner left thigh. But they spoke volumes.

Everyone my age remembers where they were and what they were doing when they first heard about the contest.

On the first day no one really noticed. Perhaps there was a chuckle among the midwives at the sight of all those babies wrapped in blue blankets, not a pink one in sight.

Greer Kadetsky met Faith Frank in October of 2006 at Ryland College, where Faith had come to deliver the Edmund and Wilhelmina Ryland Memorial Lecture

I don't mean to be dramatic, but God save me from Morgan picking our set list.

Speaking with Doc had gummed up my thoughts and left me feeling guilty.

It’s a weirdly subtle situation. I almost don’t notice I’m being blackmailed.

It was a Monday morning, it was bright, it was warm, too warm for late autumn, and Charlotte Beck was about to experience the one really dramatic thing that would happen to her in her entire life.

He came up from South America by bus.

The Súd steered a careful course around the frigates and minesweepers in the approaches to Reykjavík harbour before finally coming alongside the docks.

“Who the hell are you?”

Fergus was getting tetchy.

‘How did you find me?’ the woman asked.

After I’d finished work I came out into the night

Mornings like this morning were Iris’s favourite kind.

Sylvia Blackwell was just twenty- four when in 1958 she took up the post of Children’s Librarian in East Mole.

Ambulance sirens sucked big time when you lived in a dive near Paddington station.