Extracts

It was my mother who took me to the police station.

Tilly Hillyer woke with a jerk and a small cry, her heart in overdrive.

The rain woke her. She needs you. Eliza opened her eyes. She was facedown in the gravel of the hiking track, the smell of wet earth in her nose.

The Witch Queen comes on wings of night.

He knew it was her, he told me. He told me this a year after he saw her. Exactly a year, he said.

In a large auditorium in Geneva, a parliament of health officials gathered for the final afternoon session on emergency infectious diseases.

Line raised her head to peer through the door’s wire-mesh window.

The agent, unlike the soldier, who has many friends, is surrounded by enemies, seen and unseen.

I WAS LYING ON the road next to my car, which was parked in Sydney’s inner south.

Hold out your hands and let me lay upon them a sheaf of freshly picked sweetgrass, loose and flowing, like newly washed hair.

He woke with a start as the final siren was sounding.

The two girls waited for their mother on the verandah of the Bruce Rock pub, which offered shade but little relief from the heat of the late afternoon.

The first person I saved was a dog.

Two summers ago, my wife and I took our daughters to the zoo.

That was the order. Jack got it. Rijk van Delden—if that was his real name—was the only link between the Iron Syndicate and the nameless merc outfit the syndicate hired for their dirtiest hits.

BIGFOOT DESTROYS TOWN. That was the title of an article I received not long after the Mount Rainier eruption

It was November, three months after the awful day at the park when Olivia’s life as she knew it had been blown apart.

Rusty Rutherford emerged from his apartment on a Monday morning, exactly one week after he got fired.

To speak about the meaning and value of life may seem more necessary today (1946) than ever; the question is only whether and how this is ‘possible’.

It began with the allocating of luck, our bodies pinballs inside a machine. It was the year of overlapping adolescences, when the girls started to faint and grow tall.

'Who wants to go to the beach for a swim?' said Dad.

So heavy and unrelenting was the sense of lethargy weighing her down that she felt as if she’d been drugged.

It had taken seven minutes for the first of the fire engines to screech to a halt outside the offices of Morris & Wood, but even by then anyone could have seen it was too late.

HERE ARE SOME BASIC FACTS: Women live longer than men. Women have stronger immune systems.