The following is an excerpt from a novel, in which Phoebe Elm must return home after learning her family is one of their town’s lottery winners. The big prize? For one weekend only, they can bring someone back from the dead. They choose her father. We drive to the lake in silence, Louise at the […]
Archives for 2015
London Traffic
Chapter 1 ‘I suppose it’s safe to let you come in?’ These are his first ever words to me. Sardonic, of course; spoken with humour, but flecked, I come to realize later, with vigilance. I am standing on his doorstep; the shoes I bought on Oxford Street at the weekend have rubbed a blister into […]
The Community
Chapter one of a novel Galen wore a doctor’s mask as extra protection against his allergies as he sat cross-legged in the grass under the open kitchen window, eavesdropping on his parents’ conversation. The clapboard edges on the house’s outer wall pressed into his back, but he stayed still. His parents were discussing the best […]
Home Time
This is an edited extract from a (currently untitled) novel about three estranged siblings returning home in light of their mother’s mysterious death. They took the lift to the fourth floor of the multi-storey car park, the one just by the Olympia exhibition centre, over the tracks from their mother’s house. Experience had taught Lucille […]
Maggie
An episode from a novel, as yet untitled, which weaves together the lives of three people living in a small community in the west of Ireland The familiar crunch of gravel outside prompted Maggie to grip the arms of her chair for support and rise to her feet. She hadn’t received post since the previous […]
Ice Cream
The ice cream was the colour of little girls’ dreams. I poked my tongue into it like an insult and flicked a stream of strawberry cream into my mouth. I felt it trickle coolly down the inside of my throat, like the inversion of drinking whisky. And thicker – more sticky and viscous. The coolness […]
What I Started
Extract from a novel We lie in the scrubby grass at the bottom of the garden, Lizzie on her back with her head in the shade of a rhubarb leaf, me on my stomach, watching columns of ants trickle around the roots of Grandma’s hydrangea bush. Since we couldn’t find any lollies in the […]
Fox
She had entered his world. When she walked to the station on Monday morning, his hot blast of musk enveloped her as she passed her front railings. The smell rose again at the new-builds at the end of her street, out on the main road, and at the fringe of the park. It hit her […]
The Long Weekend
The following is the opening to a novelette. 1 Here I am. I am standing on the soft, wet bank of a beautiful clean loch, holding a bottle of twelve-year, single malt Scottish whisky and a glass. The air is crisp and fresh and cold; the sky is a beautiful, scalded pale blue. The icy […]
White Sands
‘What’s that you’re reading about, boy?’ he asks. There is something dangerous about his look. ‘Trials and tribulations?’ ‘It’s just a book I borrowed from Louie. I’m not far yet,’ I say. ‘I read some when you was in the house, pretty heavy stuff.’ ‘Oh.’ I wonder if he had found any of the sex […]