Following her husband’s death, Anne Hosansky travels to Italy with a couple at the opposite end of their relationship: Robert, who spends two hours in front of a single fresco and Lenore, their Italian speaking interpreter. With novelistic skill, this memoir paints a tender yet funny account of being abroad and feeling out of place.
In this blend of memoir and nature writing, Rachel Sloan turns to tree-planting when Brexit threatens to uproot her life in Britain.
Carol Ballantine can’t stop writing about funerals. Irish, Catholic funerals, to be precise.
Every family needs a villain. Someone to talk about, with lowered voices and raised eyebrows, when we meet at wedding dinners and baby full-moon parties.
‘I’m back at the station when the radio crackles. A man is on the tracks at Royal Oak. Seven minutes in the car, trying not to grip the arm rest. I’m out first, tugging on gloves as I run. “He’s out there now. You need to move him.”‘
‘What masochistic compulsion had driven me to take a daunting elective like Latin in the first place? I had two reasons: for one, even at 13, I was not immune to the hunky cinematic lure of Rome.’
‘If grief has a taste, then it tastes like the memory of the chips that we ate by the sea when we talked about baby names, back when the future was still family-sized.’
This extraordinary tale spanning almost a century is a blend of memoir, true crime and pure horror.
‘On my final attempt to flee I had maybe $1.35 in my pocket and a sturdy bike to whisk me to the farthest corner of town.’
Bleach-soaked carpets. Piles of burning corpses. Elizabeth Briggs remembers how the Foot and Mouth epidemic of 2001 scarred local Worcestershire farms.
Mr Jones lived down the terraced houses at the end of our street. You’d never have known. There wasn’t anything obvious about him. Often he’d be out in his front garden, mowing, or pruning, or painting a window frame. He’d call out Good Afternoon and…
‘I let Damian do his project on serial killers in Iowa. This seemed like a bad idea, which was the point.’
‘Washing your hair with bleach is not a rational response to nits. It was only as I grew up that I began to unpick the roots of my obsession with cleanliness.’
‘I woke up, still fully dressed. My pockets were completely empty. Then it hit me: holy shit. This isn’t my apartment. Six years of Marine Corps training awakened within me, and I began looking for weapons and an escape route.’
‘Come,’ issued a muffled voice. I opened the door. Cigar smoke. It was a wood-panelled office. An old man was seated behind a huge table supporting a sea of paper.
‘I’m Chris,’ I said.
He leaned back in his chair. ‘And I’m The Editor.’
‘I am eight years old and waiting outside a betting shop for my father. When he eventually steps out onto the street, he is a whirlwind of sweat and smoke. I know immediately that he’s lost all our money, the money that my mother has sent me to stop him gambling.’
‘In October 2009, I spent nearly twelve hours face down on an OR table, locked in a vice while my skull was sliced open. I had been diagnosed with a bleeding brain tumour. I learned to walk again, to swallow, to grasp objects; and I began to write.’
‘I imagine myself climbing inside the glass vitrine in the gallery, which is a bit like a sarcophagus. I’d be hunched over in there, trapped with that sculpture, a headless plaster form.’