| the thick unknowable bush |
Charlotte Wood: The Natural Way of Things, p. 37 |
| stretched white with illness |
Charlotte Wood: The Natural Way of Things, p. 150 |
| she waited, lumpish and squinting |
Charlotte Wood: The Natural Way of Things, p.206 |
| The ramparts of turned shoulders |
Hilary Mantel: An Experiment in Love, p. 72 |
| My mother didn’t need much food – she ran on wrath. |
Hilary Mantel: An Experiment in Love, p. 94 |
| The unweeded garden of their marriage |
Ian McEwan: Nutshell, p.12 |
| His face splintered with concern |
Hannah Kent: The Good People, p 5 |
| Sexual organs: the pale secrets of his body |
Hannah Kent: The Good People, p 8 |
| The skittering presence of birds |
Hannah Kent: The Good People, p 23 |
| At dinner, across the expanse of mahogany |
Kate Grenville: One Life My Mother’s Story, p 155 |
| And there Aunt Dorothy from Brasshouse Lane has lived becalmed for many years |
Margaret Drabble: The Dark Flood Rises, p 39 |
| rather stern good taste |
Kingsley Amis: You Can’t Do Both, p 215 |
| Winston was gelatinous with fatigue |
George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four, p. 208 |
| Like 1914, a sleep-walk into disaster and misery |
Dennis Glover: The Last Man in Europe, p.73 |
| Helen Garner’s description of bored jurors falling asleep in court: ‘like tulips dying in a vase’ |
Bernadette Brennan: A Writing Life Helen Garner and Her Work, p.254 |
| He held the smile for a beat too long |
Sulari Gentill: Crossing the Lines, p.182 |
| The house looked cosy and quaint, like it belonged on the lid of a tin of shortbread |
Sulari Gentill: Crossing the Lines, p.235 – 236 |
| A sudden tender regret |
Steven Carroll: A new England Affair, p. 23 |
| The gulls’ cries outside, one tapering into another |
Steven Carroll: A new England Affair, p. 164 |
| The one window still unbroken briefly held the moon |
Pat Barker: The Ghost Road, p.140 |
littlesmackerel 