‘The blossoms are pale apparitions. They ripple in a breeze. A bucketful of cream has been kicked over their branches. Each petal is the width of a baby’s palm. Clouds scud, smearing the sky. I think of our last meeting. It will be tonight.’

‘He told her she would have no choice in what was put in front of her, and she would have to eat it. As a child, he said, I’d sit at the table for hours until I learnt that I had to finish or it would be waiting for me the next morning. Just, please, whatever it is, eat it.’

‘The writer has now snared the couple who own the hotel, who have limited English and who he is therefore speaking to in a very slow, sonorous tone, the way one might to a dog.’

‘The point is, I do not know before I walk onstage what preparation awaits me. I programme my concerts as seriously as any other performer. Do I rehearse? Ha, well I rehearse a little. I am not the most prepared pianist.’

‘On her first day working here Anna told her that she hired her because of her calm, collected way of dealing with the questions in the interview. She assumes that Anna knows she is the opposite of this and has basically hired a yin to her yang. At another level she understands very clearly what Anna expects of her.’

‘We lived apart for more than a year after the wedding. Aaron was sent to support the LA office after their director fell down an escalator. The accident wasn’t considered too serious at first, so neither was our separation.’

‘A lump of clay is on the wheel that I know is mine because there is a nice pink post-it with my name misspelled on it telling me so. I pin a name badge in the same pink to my jumper, but I add the E where it should be. I hope nobody will mind. I sit at the wheel and it turns, as he said it would. I move my hands and the clay moves with them. It spins in a way which feels at once like tactile peace and like I am on the edge of chaos.’

‘This is our weekly ritual. An afternoon ramble to walk off a hearty Sunday lunch, pacing the ridge at the city’s rim where the twisted-trunked trees grew without a planner’s hand. Under our boots, the downfall of leaves from last night’s storm churns to mulch.’

‘I think about the woodland. I think about bars of morning sunlight, bobbing with life; aphids and spores. I think about the bulk of the herd moving through the undergrowth, gracefully, like whales through water.’

‘The daughter belongs to another world, she’ll not stay long in this one. She looks like Isak Dinesen at the end of her siege with love. Or Karen Carpenter with that pointy chin and the claws of her arms, all anatomy and parched organs, the scales wavering downward, the consumed heart.’

‘Maddie came to meet me in her jeep to collect me from town and I thought here’s a woman for whom no poems have been written.’

‘When Gabe wouldn’t talk as a baby, oh man, did we have excuses. Same as now. Colleen wants to know where we’ve been, have we sided with Connor? She’s at the door in denim.’

‘A man squatting at the bottom of a set of stone steps with an M-14 rifle balanced on his knees is not the something that I expected to see on the path down to the beach, but there he was.’

‘I was following Vida Mondana. Everyone was. She was the biggest star on the planet. We were just the debris in her orbit.’

‘She took the box into the living room and wedged it onto the sofa. She had no idea what was in it and the box didn’t give any clues.’

‘As I walk along Bankside on my way to the Tate Modern, on the evening of what is certain— given the prognosis outlined by my oncologist—to be my last private view, I recall how it began one August morning, more than half a lifetime ago’

‘One of the things Agnès told me, in the short time I was with her, was about an uncontacted tribe who lived on an island in the Indian Ocean, who had never discovered the secret of fire.’

‘The character sits at a table outside Le Refuge, a small café tucked into the corner of Rue Lamarck and Rue Pierre Dac. He is reading a paperback copy of Georges Perec’s Life: A User’s Manual and, on the table in front of him, is a small glass of imported Dutch beer.’

‘No one would notice. That’s what he told himself as he climbed the fence. He looked back down the street again and saw it was still empty. Some stray dogs were on the corner and one had detached itself from the group and followed him. It now sat and watched curiously.’

‘Just after I turned thirteen I woke up one Saturday to find my snake had escaped. Mum said it wasn’t my fault, but it was. Later, Nan came round for mum to do her feet.’