Happiness.  A happy family.  The Lovatts were a happy family.  It was what they had chosen and what they deserved.  Often, when David and Harriet lay face to face, it seemed that doors in their breasts flew open, and what poured out was an intensity of relief, of thankfulness, that still astonished them both: patience for what seemed now such a very long time had not been easy, after all.  It had been hard preserving their belief in themselves when the spirit of the times, the greedy and selfish sixties, had been so ready to condemn them, to isolate, to diminish their best selves.  And look, they had been right…

“I shall spare you Brother Juniper’s generalizations.  They are always with us.  He thought he saw in the same accident the wicked visited by destruction and the good called early to Heaven.  He thought he saw pride and wealth confounded as an object lesson to the world, and he thought he saw humility crowned and rewarded for the edification of the city.  But Brother Juniper was not satisfied with his reasons.  It was just possible that the Marquesa de Montemayor was not a monster of avarice, and Uncle Pio of self-indulgence.” An historic rope bridge collapses in Lima, Peru, in 1714, dashing 5 people to their death in the gulf…

If fate were trying to kill you, how would you escape its deathly grasp? If your solution were to change your name, disguise yourself by dressing and acting differently, and protecting yourself by obtaining an imaginary dog, a greyhound named Boy, then you might be David Case. David is 15, and lives in a suburb of London with his parents and his baby brother, Charlie. One day he saves Charlie from jumping out of a window to his certain demise (Charlie was wanting to fly like the birds), and rather than feeling blessed and fortunate, he instead snaps and decides that Fate is out to get him, and his best…

Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha is the story of a ten-year-old Irish boy in 1968.  The book is told in Paddy’s voice, and Roddy Doyle captures the confusion and attempts to make sense of the world that go along with being 10, suppositions and extrapolations that children make.  Paddy on death and religion: When Indians died – Red ones –  they went to the happy hunting ground.  Vikings went to Valhalla when they died or they got killed.  We went to heaven, unless we went to hell.  You went to hell if you had a mortal sin on your soul when you died, even if you were on your way…

“Wanna go to the movies?” he asked. No one had ever asked Debbie this question before.  She had imagined, often, being asked this question, but not by Lenny.  He was the wrong person.  Wasn’t he?  She had never felt that way about him. Had she? His question caught her off guard, and she didn’t know what to do with it.  The part of her that was open to the universe was facing in another direction just then.  She felt disoriented and uncomfortable and there was Lenny, waiting for her to say something back. “I think it’s better if we’re just friends,” she said. To her relief Patty arrived with a…

“He was not what you’d call a lovable man, my grandad.  It wasn’t that he was cold, exactly.  It was more as though he had a huge distance inside himself.  There’s a game I used to play with my friends.  One of us had to think of someone we all knew, and the others had to work out who it was by asking questions like “If this person was a musical instrument, what would it be?”  I used to think that if Grandad were a place, it would be one of those great empty landscapes you sometimes see in American movies: flat, an endless road, tumbleweed blown by a moaning…