Lisa Jewell

Awnings flapping in a brisk wind

My cleverness oozed out of me like goo

Silence subsumes the house

A plume of ice went down Laurel’s spine.

Had she woken up every morning suffused with existential joy? No, she had not.

‘All men are weak,’ said Phin. ‘That’s the whole bloody trouble with the world. Too weak to love properly. Too weak to be wrong.’

I was nearly eleven when they came, and my sister was nine.

They lived with us for more than five years and they turned everything very, very dark. My sister and I had to learn how to survive.

And when I was sixteen, and my sister was fourteen, the baby came.

To Miss Libby Louise Jones

As trustee of the Henry and Martina Lamb Trust created on 12 July 1977, I propose to make the distribution from it to you described in the attached schedule …

Sixteen Cheyne Walk, SW3.

They’ve left me the house.’