Fire Hides Everywhere

Начало книги

There are many people to whom I owe much. I’d like to thank Remi Slade-Caffarel, Genevieve Gagne-Hawes, Mathilde Huron, Kathleen Craig, Louisa Pillot, and Alicia Heimersson for reading, being read to, editing, and generally providing help along the way. I’d also like to thank my family for their love and support: Audrey, Gerard, Christian, Claire… that’s you. In this third and perfectly acceptable sentence I think I will direct the stream of my gratitude towards Alfie Bown for his generous disposition and help in getting Fire Hides Everywhere into the hands of the Zero Books team, whom I’d also like to thank for their support and expertise, particularly Emma Jacobs for the copy-edit. Finally, a little word for you, dear reader: thank you. For picking this novel up. For reading literary fiction in general. And for accepting to come on this journey with me.

The twins had blonde hair and dull green eyes and tanned skin. Sabine, whose hair was longer than Marc’s, wore a thick scar near her pubis where Christophe had removed her appendix. The old man had forced the child supine atop the dinner table and bound her there with old rags. He had unseamed her bloated flesh with a match-singed razor blade and removed the mucilaginous growth with his bare hands as the other children watched from outside the farmhouse. Their eyeballs were locked, faces warped in a spill, down into the whitewashed wood of the window frame, where the glass pooled thick and hazy. There a horsefly beat continually against the thin upper-pane, falling to the sill below, wings an opalescent blue.

Читать дальше →