Little Fires Everywhere: The New York Times Top Ten Bestseller

Pauline, twenty pounds thinner, looked like a more concentrated version of herself: whittled down, somehow, pared down to her essence.

Toughness rendered tender, even beautiful.

She had, in short, done everything right and she had built a good life, the kind of life she wanted, the kind of life everyone wanted. Now here was this Mia, a completely different kind of woman leading a completely different life, who seemed to make her own rules with no apologies. Like the photograph of the spider-dancer, Mrs. Richardson found th

Part of her wanted to scream, so she slid a Tori Amos CD into the player, turned up the volume, and let it do the screaming for her.

prompted by the merest thread, the way memories often do.

who thought the best way to push students out of their comfort zones was to bulldoze them into rubble during critiques.

the blades of grass in the breeze, changing color as they went, from dark to light, like the nap of velvet when you brushed your hand over it; the way the stream of water broke itself into droplets as it splashed against the cup’s rim.

Each room had been painted a different color – the kitchen a sunny yellow, the living room a deep cantaloupe, the bedrooms a warm peach – and the overall effect was of stepping into a box of sunlight, even on a cloudy day.

Izzy had the heart of a radical, but she had the experience of a fourteen-year-old living in the suburban Midwest.

What would her parents say? The neighbors, her teachers, her friends?