Extracts

Nine months after He died, I opened the door and smelled summer.

“We need to talk about your eighteenth birthday.”

Tell me again about the first time the two of you played chess in the park.” Jameson’s face was candlelit, but even in the scant light, I could see the gleam in his dark green eyes.

When I was a kid, my mom constantly invented games.

She felt their eyes, all those executioners.

Arctic wind lashed the boat.

It was an undecided and hazy spring, the spring that MAS370 disappeared, and I didn’t know what I was doing in London.

It’s Saturday afternoon, not yet 2 pm, and the humidity is relentless.

It wasn’t Nora she’d wanted to meet that day.

We were sitting in a cafe with three friends and excitedly telling them about our book Raising Girls Who Like Themselves, when, to our surprise, tears started to well in the eyes of one of our friends.

Before I say anything, I’d just like to make one thing perfectly clear: I didn’t stab anyone.

When I was shortlisted for the fellowship that turned into the book you are reading now, I texted my mum.

On her seventh birthday, as a gift, her father had let her read a spell

So, I’m writing again.

My mother could change the color of her skin.

For the first six days of William Waters’s life, he was not an only child.

Starlight spilled down the flanks of the mountain.

Four names on the lease and, as of today, seven people in the house.

Grunting, sullen, in spumes of leaden smoke, the black Daimler with diplomatic number plate noses onto Via Diciannove, beads of sleet fizzling on its hood.

Lenny Marks seldom found herself unprepared.

Curly and I make the final turn.

I wake at dawn, facedown on the sofa, thinking I’m back in Block Ten.

It wasn’t the first time Evan had drunk vodka atop a glacier.

At dawn that morning, a man dressed entirely in black nosed his gray Ford sedan up to the curb on Taylor Street.