Extracts

It seemed like just another ordinary Tuesday when Sophie met Baccio.

Malibu catches fire.

Discarded medical equipment litters the floor: surgical tools blistered with rust, broken bottles, jars, the scratched spine of an old invalid chair.

I stood in the darkness of my living room, my knuckles white, my fingers tense around the sticky rubber handle of my Little League baseball bat, staring out the window into the night, trying desperately to protect my wife

It was a wild and lightning-struck night.

‘The full moon rose over us,’ Layla sang, while she carefully joined two pieces of metal together in the broiling, cramped welding bay.

How could one say with any certainty what one hated most in the world?

She’d created a little altar on the chest of drawers in her bedroom

Forty-five, married and healthy, Liv Winsome was increasingly dismayed by her lot.

Carra Finlay stood under the clothesline and watched in dismay as all her dreams blew away in the wind.

Adolf Hitler hasn’t seen daylight for a month now.

When people say ‘terminal’, I think of the airport.

I felt cold. Cold in the way of night sweats

After a bumpy flight, fifteen men dropped from the Montana sky.

It wasn’t me!

As I write this on a Friday afternoon it has been forty-eight hours and he has barely lifted his head.

After more than two weeks at sea to simmer the tension between them, Violet and Daisie Chettle couldn’t stand each other, let alone stand next to each other.

A stir moves through the Pride House Group Home, and seconds later adolescent faces pig against the muggy front window.