“ Compulsively readable ”
Daily Telegraph
Paperback
9781784873189
May 22, 2017
Vintage Classics
336 pages
Hardback
9781784708238
October 30, 2017
Vintage
336 pages
Paperback
9781784871444
October 3, 2016
Vintage Children's Classics
512 pages
Paperback
9780099511663
December 1, 2010
Vintage Classics
336 pages
Hardback
9781841593012
September 15, 2006
Everyman
392 pages
Paperback
9780099740919
October 25, 1996
Vintage
320 pages
EBook
9781473546967
August 4, 2016
Vintage Digital
512 pages
EBook
9781446485477
May 15, 2012
Vintage Digital
336 pages
Audio CD
9781786141637
May 7, 2019
Audiobooks
We slept in what had once been the gymnasium. The floor was of varnished wood, with stripes and circles painted on it, for the games that were formerly played there; the hoops for the basketball nets were still in place, though the nets were gone. A balcony ran around the room, for the spectators, and I thought I could smell, faintly like an afterimage, the pungent scent of sweat, shot through with the sweet taint of chewing gum and perfume from the watching girls, felt-skirted as I knew from pictures, later in mini-skirts, then pants, then in one earring, spiky green-streaked hair. Dances would have been held there; the music lingered, a palimpsest of unheard sound, style upon style, an undercurrent of drums, a forlorn wail, garlands made of tissue-paper flowers, cardboard devils, a revolving ball of mirrors, powdering the dancers with a snow of light.
There was old sex in the room and loneliness, and expectation, of something without a shape or name. I remember that yearning, for something that was always about to happen and was never the same as the hands that were on us there and then, in the small of the back, or out back, in the parking lot, or in the television room with the sound turned down and only the pictures flickering over lifting flesh.
Continue Reading
