Extracts

Umiko Wada wasn’t a private detective. She just worked for one.

‘More fizz, anyone? Dad – how about you? You’re not even driving, so no excuses.’

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

Tokyo Station is packed. It’s been a while since Yuichi Kimura was here last, so he isn’t sure if it’s always this crowded.

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.

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

My best friend, a seasoned homicide detective, is a master of discontent.

BLUMP. This is the sound of a book sitting.

I was a forty-three-year-old mother of two when I lost my orgasm.

The car hits my sixteen-year-old son at 35 miles per hour.

A slap. A cry. Distress, which seems a poor enough start to things.

Your house glows at night like everything inside is on fire.

Twig dolls peculiar to the small Sussex village of Chapel Croft.

When I was born my insides lay outside my body for twenty-one days.

How many of us know our neighbours? Interact with our greengrocer? Know the names of the people who make our clothing?

I’m late for dinner again, but this time it’s not my fault. There’s a mansplainer in my way.

April in Melbourne is always glorious but through most of the autumn of 2020, between the hours of five and six, there was an exquisite clarity to the rose-gold sheen of the sky