Sublime
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The “poor chap” of whom the Colonel was thinking was his son, Denis, now a prisoner of war in Japanese hands. Whether the Colonel’s epithet was due to Denis’s plight or to the wife he had married was uncertain, but Colonel St Cyres disliked his daughter-in-law as heartily as any well-bred man allowed himself to dislike a woman.
E. C. R. Lorac • Fire in the Thatch
At thirty his father looked fifty; stooped by labor, he gazed without hope at the arid patch of land that sustained the family from one year to the next. His mother regarded her life patiently, as if it were a long moment that she had to endure.
John McGahern • Stoner
What Adam was witnessing were the remnants of a culture where once he was, by law, obeyed and pacified. That kind of “hospitality” was in fact a legacy of his people’s wrongdoing. Or maybe it went further back still; maybe it was this “hospitality” that gave colonizers the impression that they were welcome in the first place, to claim a land and
... See moreAyesha Manazir Siddiqi • The Centre: A Novel
She joined him in making butterfly nets and ran behind them like a small child, indifferent to the bombs and missiles exploding incessantly nearby. She was convinced that the best way of beating the war was to stop talking about it. She had stopped being afraid of dying a long time before and was even more reckless than Abdel Latif, who would rush
... See moreKhaled Khalifa • Death Is Hard Work

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Fatima Farheen Mirza • A Place for Us: A Novel
The babies had been unplanned: Clara greeted her first pregnancy with astonishment that such a thing could happen to her, and her second with dismay; now, during her third, she had subsided into a grim but inert fatalism. Her metaphors for her children included barnacles encrusting a ship and limpets clinging to a rock.
-Margaret Atwood, The Edible
... See moreFather was many things, none of them gentle. So when, on the first frosty night of the year, Isha called Carolyn over to lie with her and her child for warmth, something broke open inside her. She did not weep or otherwise show weakness—that was not in her nature—but she took Isha into her heart wholly and completely. Not long after, winter
... See moreScott Hawkins • The Library at Mount Char
Bolbol found it all hard to believe. He just couldn’t think of his father as a lonely, unrequited lover. At last he understood the secret of Abdel Latif’s love for Iraqi songs! For whenever Nevine abandoned something from her past, Abdel Latif reflexively picked it up and kept it, polishing it anew and storing it in some remote corner of his life.
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