Jane Eyre. It was an Oxford World's Classics edition. Similar to the one we owned and similarly worn from constant handling. There was a difference between a book that was regularly opened and a book that was not. The smell, the resistance of the spine, the ease with...

Quote 1: "The beauty of this city is too elemental, too fecund and raw, to be tamed by mere money. Though the financiers and bankers and dot.com millionaires hug the shoreline, their topiary palaces and towered developments will never conquer this landscape....

Quote 1: The weather stayed awful almost all of the time. Cold and brown and windy. But one day in the middle of April the sun came out and William and I walked out on the rocks–it was low tide–and then we walked to a closed store that was the only other building out...

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Months passed, winter easing gently into place, as southern winters do. The sun, warm as a blanket, wrapped Kya’s shoulders, coaxing her deeper into the marsh…

Quote 1:  ‘Kierkegaard thinks that music begins where language ends,’ Finnegan said. ‘Beyond language—or when language reaches its peak—you get music.’  I considered that. ‘I can’t believe we’re talking about Kierkegaard,’ I said. ‘You’re not. I am. And the...

Mma Potokwani was watching her friend… ‘Dear friend,’ she said, ‘of course I shall help you. Of course, I shall. And we shall start tomorrow, first thing. After breakfast, that is.’ ‘I would never do anything before breakfast,’ said Mma Ramotswe. And they both...

Grief is a sea made of your own tears. Salty swells cover the dark depths you must swim at your own pace. It takes time to build stamina. Some days, my arms sliced through the water, and I felt things would be okay, the shore wasn’t so far off. Then one memory, one...

Quote 1: When I looked up through the web of trees, the night fell over me, and for a moment I lost my boundaries, feeling like the sky was my own skin and the moon was my heart beating up there in the dark. Quote 2: … what I felt was magnetic and so big it ached like...

I cling to the rail, suspended between the dazzle of sea and unbroken blue sky. The boat turned and there it was! Hey presto, the sudden flourish, conjured from bare rock by the gods and lit by the sun. A theatre for dreamers. The trick worked every time. The white...

I sat on the log watching the log fade, the river holding the soft glow of the sky. There were five Burramattagal children picking their way along a slip of sand, each child’s long thin legs straightening and jointing, straightening and jointing, legs made for walking...