Date: 2005

"Sometimes I'd be hooked out, plucked and hauled right up into the daylight where I'd find Trevellian shining his torch into me, its shaft falling across my mind's patterned surfaces but managing to occupy them only briefly before it retreated and the inner darkness massed again."

— McCarthy, Tom (b. 1969)

Date: 2009

"He turned and lay down on his front alongside her, head resting on his arms, their elbows touching, and once again she could hear the sound of his thoughts."

— Nicholls, David (b. 1966)

Date: 2009

"Forced to raise her voice, Emma could hear it echoing in her head as she spoke with great passion and force about her new career."

— Nicholls, David (b. 1966)

Date: 2009

"A little bit of success and they want to knock you down well I don't care I like my job and I'm bloody good at it and it's much much harder than people think balls of steel that's what you need to be a TV presenter and a mind like a like a well quick-thinking anyway and besides you mustn't take ...

— Nicholls, David (b. 1966)

Date: 2009

"Emma felt another small portion of her soul fall away."

— Nicholls, David (b. 1966)

Date: 2009

"This kind of erotic reverie occupied great swathes of Dexter's mental energy, and he wondered if perhaps Emma was right, perhaps he was a little too distracted by the sexual side of things."

— Nicholls, David (b. 1966)

Date: 2009

"Blackbirds are singing on Coldharbour Lane and he has the sensation, so vivid that it is almost an hallucination, that he is entirely hollow; empty, like an easter egg."

— Nicholls, David (b. 1966)

Date: 2009

"He had always imagined that some sort of emotional mental equipment was meant to arrive, when he was forty-five, say, or fifty, a kind of kit that would enable him to deal with the impending loss of a parent. If he were only in possession of this equipment, he would be just fine. He would be nob...

— Nicholls, David (b. 1966)

Date: 2009

"All these years later he still carried with him, would carry for life, the image of her standing in mismatched underwear in the staffroom of Loco Caliente, illuminated by a shaft of afternoon sun like the light in a cathedral, as she yelled at him to get out and shut the bloody door."

— Nicholls, David (b. 1966)