Extracts

It’s a message to the Everly family group chat from my father.

What if I jumped?

The house looked like any other house and the door looked like any other door. Normal.

How to make comparison constructive

I checked my horoscope this morning (Aquarius), like I do every day.

I kiss my wife on the lips. Her breath smells of last night’s toothpaste mixed with sleep.

“Daddy, what’s an ‘eejit’?”

Waste not, want not.

I was born dead.

It was a perfect day for walking. The morning had broken and washed the sky in technicolour; palest lemon blending into brazen orange and deep, dark ochre.

Winter was an unforgiving time on Holy Island.

We Are All More Than Our Self-Doubts

THREE AND A HALF YEARS EARLIER

Economics is mass psychology.

Picture this. I’m a guest on a private island in the British Virgin Islands.

When he’s fifteen, he and his mother move to a new town and he starts at a new school. It’s not an easy age to do that – the social order of the school is already well established and he has some difficulty making friends.

I almost expected to see my doppelgänger sprinting across town pursued by a mob, but I guess things didn’t work that way. — RANSOM RIGGS, MISS PEREGRINE’S HOME FOR PECULIAR CHILDREN

Given I’m dying, and have just the one pen, let’s motor through the pleasantries.

Nora and Stevie were lucky by name and lucky by nature – at least that’s what they’d been told throughout their forty-nine years.