Art and culture

“There is a place, hidden among the sweeping sandy swaths of southern desert, where all you can see is red. From above, it’s a carpet of crimson, but as you lean closer, you see that it’s not one singular sheet of color, but rows upon rows of distinct red dots. Like a wild field of poppies. Except it’s nothing like that."

“Sometimes, in her sleepless hours, she watches the strips of moonlight slide across her bedroom ceiling, glances at that photograph, and thinks wistfully about the family she could have had, all the pictures of holidays that will never exist...."

“Salento, Italy, June 1934: A coach stops in the main square of Lizzanello, a tight-knit village where everyone knows one another. A couple gets off: the man, Carlo, is happy to be back home after a long time away; the woman, Anna - his wife - is a stranger from the North. Carlo’s brother is there to meet them, and he and everyone else can’t help but notice that Anna is as beautiful as a Greek statue.”

“Strange people often came to the farm, but they tended to be late risers, so Mad knew the first few hours would be easy…Now she looked up to see a car driving down the dirt road, a PT Cruiser, which was not a car that you saw in this area."

“It’s one of the last days before Easter. Very soon Louisa is going to be thrown out of an art auction for vandalizing a valuable painting. Old ladies will shriek and the police will come and it really wasn’t planned.”

“It is three p.m., and Elizabeth is carrying flowers for Marcus Carmichael. The dead man. That drowned body, suddenly alive as you like and living at 14 Ruskin Court. The man she saw lowered into a grave in a Hampshire churchyard, now unpacking boxes and struggling with his new Wi-Fi.”

“A dragon without its rider is a tragedy. A rider without their dragon is dead…Article One, Section One, The Dragon Rider’s Codex...."

“Later that day the cops would crawl over the intricacies of his life and discover he was into pirates because he had been born with only one eye."

“Killing someone is easy. Hiding the body, now, that’s usually the hard part. That’s how you get caught."

“Santa Monica, 1923. The plane rattled, as if with fever. The engine spit once, and then, like a ruptured heart, my Curtiss OX-5 engine burst, spewing hot oil from both sides of its chest."