Sublime

As an adult, Alan still stays in close touch with his mother and does whatever he can to help make her life easier.

She was a stocky woman; a home help from Roystonhill who had searching eyes and skin that had yellowed like old kitchen paint. Her salt-and-pepper hair was clipped short and her mouth was puckered with fine lines from smoking forty a day for forty years.

Human nature is hunted and has fled into sanctuary.

A vida deles em Carricklea, que tinham imbuído de tanto drama e importância, terminou desse jeito, sem conclusão, e jamais seria retomada, jamais da mesma forma.

Grace Macaulay – in whose veins ran Essex rivers and Bible ink; in whose philosophy the devils of hell and the saints of Bethesda did battle with her reason and her nature – sat with her phone on the bare floor of a Hackney room and thought of Thomas Hart. Come home, he’d written, you wretched child, and I am wretched, she thought, and I think I’d

It had all been arranged by advert and telephone: the Fredrikson family were offering a holiday home to a child for the summer out of the goodness of their hearts, and for a small fee, of course. Axel and Hanna had discussed it thoroughly – all the big-city children in need of fresh air, woods, water, and good food. They had said all the things

Mungo laid his head against the headrest, and half-closed his eyes. Through the canopy of his lashes he considered the man’s fingernails again, pink and broad and healthy. There was a peek of pale unblemished skin where his shirt met his wrist. These were not hands that worked the land in all weather. They spoke of days sat reading books in the