This novel’s set-out is simple: In Shaker Heights, everything is perfect. The city has been planned perfectly; the street lay-out is designed to eliminate traffic problems and there are rules for what shades of paint are allowed for each neighbourhood so that the houses look harmonious together – it’s a city where everything is planned…
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Whoever it was that made the mountains tall and the stars far-away and bright must have known about beauty and life, and the strangeness of it all. How come there’s an earth so perfectly tailor-made for every little being to co-exist; there’s the bees, which live their own little busy lives, with social ladders to…
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He served us wine and homemade Spanish tortilla and he spoke with a soft ‘c’ and his nose was sharp and his hair was sprawled out onto his back in black curls, and all the while he was rushing and talking and joking and smiling. He’s from the Basque country, he said. How come a…
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Since she could think, the lighthouse tower had always been there, and before that, too, printed in shapes and colours into the windings of her mind. It sat there on the rocky tongue of earth that slipped out into the ocean just to the right of the small harbour, where boats anchored, never more than…
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Words have always been her home, a respite from not quite being herself yet, a palace built out of sweat and ink for her to live in as long as she pleases, until she is old enough to not need them anymore (& she hopes she never will); a world of adventures and hope and…
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