He had the kind of real deep tan that rich people spend ages trying to achieve with expensive holidays and bits of tinfoil, when really all you need to do to obtain one is work your arse off in the open air every day.

It didn’t occur to her to start worrying. For the first eight years of her life the world had been a particularly boring place and now that it was becoming interesting Esk wasn’t about to act ungrateful.

Behind her the Ramtops still acted as a hitching rail for clouds, but they no longer dominated as they had done for as long as Esk had known them. Distance had eroded them.

it is well known that a vital ingredient of success is not knowing that what you’re attempting can’t be done. A person ignorant of the possibility of failure can be a half-brick in the path of the bicycle of history.

but a hint was to Esk what a mosquito bite was to the average rhino because she was already learning that if you ignore the rules people will, half the time, quietly rewrite them so that they don’t apply to you.

‘Granny,’ said Esk, in the exasperated and remarkably adult voice children use to berate their wayward elders. ‘I don’t think you quite understand. I don’t want to hit the ground. It’s never done anything to me.’

a shadow’s width away.

A bass note sounds. It is a deep, vibrating chord that hints that the brass section may break in at any moment with a fanfare for the cosmos, because the scene is the blackness of deep space with a few stars glittering like the dandruff on the shoulders of God.

the air was full of the busy silence of the night, which is created by hundreds of small furry things treading very carefully in the hope of finding dinner while avoiding being the main course.