“Prime numbers are what is left when you have taken all the patterns away. I think prime numbers are like life. They are very logical but you could […]
English literature
The Light Between Oceans
“You only have to forgive once. To resent, you have to do it all day, every day.” Part One The novel opens with Tom Sherbourne, a World War […]
English literature
The Mirror and the Light
“The fate of peoples is made like this, two men in small rooms. Forget the coronations, the conclaves of cardinals, the pomp and processions. This is how the […]
English literature
Bring Up the Bodies
“The dead are unseeing, unhearing. The dead are not our business. They cannot be reached, they cannot be touched, they cannot be spoken to.” Part One: Falconry Thomas […]
English literature
Wolf Hall
“Lock Cromwell in a deep dungeon in the morning, and when you come back that night he’ll be sitting on a plush cushion eating larks’ tongues, and all […]
English literature
The Stranger’s Child
“The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there.” Part One: Two Acres (1913) The novel opens in 1913 at the affluent Stanmore household, “Two Acres,” […]
English literature
The Line of Beauty
“It was a summer of strangers, a summer of departures.” Chapter 1: 1983 The novel opens in the summer of 1983, introducing Nick Guest, a young gay man […]
English literature
Swing Time
“It was the first time I had understood how a thing can seem to be one thing but also another, how a single surface can be divided, like […]
English literature
NW
“The fat sun stalls by the phone masts. Anti-climb paint turns sulphurous on school gates and lampposts. In Willesden people go barefoot, the streets turn European, there is […]
English literature
White Teeth
“What is past is prologue.” — William Shakespeare (Epigraph in White Teeth) Part One: Archie 1974, 1945 The novel opens with Archie Jones, a middle-aged Englishman, attempting suicide […]