Sublime

Quite a strange man, thought James, watching him go – but what a relief to discover he still contained the capacity to be taken by surprise.

The Central Library, home to six thousand books and one ghost—Agatha Cunningham, age six—was meant to itself approximate the shape of an open book—a neat architectural trick few of its patrons acknowledged as they waited grumpily for their turns on the public computers—with the atrium serving as its spine. At one end/page of the atrium was the

On the evening of 26 July, Arne-Sayles invited Giussani and his fiancée, Elena Marietti, to a dinner party at Casale del Pino. During dinner Arne-Sayles talked about the other world (a place where architecture and oceans were muddled together) and how it was possible to get there. Elena Marietti thought that Arne-Sayles was talking metaphorically

It would be her home for the next seven years, until the Great Storm brought Charlie to her door. The cottage had been derelict in those days, and she’d had no money to restore it, not that she’d wanted to. She had only wanted the windmill. She’d moved right in. She only had a couple of bags, and nowhere else to go and she’d simply slotted herself

Even her bare limbs were so free from suntan that one’s gaze, stroking her white shins and forearms, could follow upon them the regular slants of fine dark hairs, the silks of her girlhood.