Beverly was a very attractive woman; unfortunately, it was always the wrong men who would be attracted to her.

Like I said, so what?’‘I think you’d like Miles Davis.’ Sunglasses laughed at the joke. Tatum didn’t get it, but she felt they were toying with her like cats pulling strands from a ball of wool.‘Never fucking heard of him. Like I said, so what?

Jack was excellent at his job as long as he stuck to Mr Lemon’s instructions, ‘Always be nice to the customers, even if some of them are arrogant assholes.

She was still in her late twenties, but the gap made her believe her body clock wasn’t ticking but had actually stopped.

Her revelations made her feel such a blind fool, as she recalled, but never investigated, all the little bumps her Ma had suffered.

If anyone caught his eye on the number 31 bus that took him from his run-down estate into the small but vibrant financial hub of the Northwest, in Arlington, he’d give nothing away but a smile.

She played with this problem, over and over, in her mind, until she had a political epiphany. Like restless hands fidgeting with the Rubik’s Cube she accidentally lined up the colours of all the faces, and she realised her conflict wasn’t with the races: it was with the genders.

Even sleep couldn’t defeat pain. Pain covers sleep. Pain always wins.Now the romance was well and truly dead between Joseph and Klaudia, it was time to head down the rocky road of mutual emotional destruction.

He did notice Tony’s gleaming white teeth for the first time. Tony wasn’t known for his smiling. He tried to find a suitable word to describe this smile, but the only word that came to him was expensive.