Extracts

It’s rained for forty days and forty nights, so when a guy who looks like Jesus in orange SES overalls comes to stand next to her, Rosie thinks it’s all a bit biblical.

So here’s how it is: I’m a live-in carer for Walter Smyth. He is very rich, very old, very sick and very senile. Over the next eight years, dozens of people will occupy this role.

“Hurry,” I heard someone say. “He’s losing a lot of blood.”

It should have been the greatest day of his life.

She made her skittering, sliding way down the riverbank. Her trainers hit the flat ground at the lip of the water, and she wobbled but recovered.

The call comes at 3 a.m. The jagged ring of the bedside telephone tearing a hole in our sleep. I reach out a hand to silence it.

The real trouble came at midnight.

Everyone is staring at me.

Red and yellow leaves drift down through the sunlight on to the wet asphalt, which cuts through the woods like a dark and glassy river.

Dusk at the end of winter, and two men walked in the door-yard of a palace scarred by fire.

Jean Farmer took the call, and regretted instantly that she’d been the one to pick up the phone.

It starts with a rumour. Whispers at the school gate.

The moose could not explain why only a few humans could see it.

The three boys bounded through the grass towards the forest, a spray of panicky hoppers glimmering around them, while John Henry recited the passage from Scouting for Boys that approved the adventure.

 “You have four kinds of sparkling water,” Mia reports from the depths of our refrigerator.

To get to the tiny village of Kittredge, Colorado, which for five days in 1987 became the unlikely center of the political solar system, you have to take the interstate about ten miles west of Denver

Even the most perfect life can shatter in seconds, and Brook Connor’s nightmare began approximately two minutes after she walked through her front door.

On the way home from the hospital, she asked him if he wanted her to stay.

In Mother Russia, secrets did not stay secret for long.

She wasn’t beautiful, and she was of course perfectly aware of it.

Twenty-one minutes before the ambush, Harrison Tucker is lying on his stomach on a king-size bed in an Atlanta hotel room

There was once an inn that sat peacefully on the bank of the Thames at Radcot, a long day’s walk from the source.

In the middle of the journey of my life I found myself inside a tent of mirrors.

So, you’ve finished reading Up the Duff: The Real Guide to Pregnancy, and now you’ve thrown it at the wall and you’re shouting ‘Yes, but what do I do now the bloody baby has arrived, you dreadful slattern?!’