The Singing Worlds—Novel Extract An hour before first light, Zeth rises, dresses without a lantern, packs his bag, and brews a flask of...

The Ambulance I’m not that skeleton they found. I’m not the pile of naked branches in which children have built their second homes. I...

Grande Luca Chapter One I received a phone call. It was a local to home number, an English number. However, I was in Portovenere, where...

The Hot Box INT. HOT BOX – DAY – 7TH AUGUST 1976, PARIS There’s a fly somewhere. Every twenty seconds it buzzes, lands, quietens long...

‘2098’ Chapter 1 Jade had stayed up all day again. She watched the small sliver of sky from her shuttered window go from pigeon-grey to...

The White Room ‘As a white wall cuts itself into pages in the shadows, she finds herself stepping into the room as an idea in the...

Conner and Mo This is what not knowing your luck looks like: a spacious living/dining room in a Victorian house in North London, on a...

The Minute Before Sleep In the minute before sleep, the words in my head took me down an unfamiliar street. I had been remembering the...

AFTER TIME ONE/AFTER I was walking in a leafy southern suburb of London when a scene devolved in front of me in almost perfect silence. A...

Ghost Directory (abridged) 1. Five years, ten months and a day before. We’re sitting in your back garden eating ice cream. It was the day...

‘Speaking from Experience’ Three Monologues The Last Word Hello, love, it’s your mother. Awful I can’t see your lovely face. What can we...

Somalia—December 1976 The crests of the silver dunes shimmered over darkened troughs. The night breeze spilt trickles of burnished grains...

Preserves I write this all in the present tense because every time I make risotto I am seventeen, hungry, and she is immortal. Crowded...

It Was Bound to Happen Eventually ‘They showed up and popped up that fence,’ the woman says as she stacks the donuts in the little pastry...

Later, Pond won’t look the way it looks now. Sunrays streak when afternoon hits. As a child, I did not know this, how Pond came to be...

Aileen and I Rising from the treeline at the bottom of the gently sloping allotments stand the bare skeletons of four new flat...

The Edge of America Six sleeping pills, three hours sleep and fourteen hours into an eighteen-hour journey. It was early in the evening,...

Typhoon A typhoon was coming. Amelia could feel it in the air. The wind twisted the trees and sent chimeras flailing into the...

Peach Pit Flat 3, Butchers Works Harry Belafonte’s ‘Shake, Shake Señora’ blasts from your speaker after Lauren puts on her ‘Boogie...

In the darkroom The monobath stains our lips a bitter blue an impression of a field I’ll never see again-your wide eyes develop right in...