Showing results by author "R. B. Russell" in All Categories

'I think that love is best left to the young,' Donna said. 'I expect that one day it will be viewed by psychiatrists as a mental health problem rather than anything wonderful or spiritual.

Samuel Miller discovered the photograph tucked away in the back of his father's wallet. The hospital had given it to him along with the other items the old man had been carrying when he had been admitted.

The Restaurant San Martín in Mendoza did not appear to have changed at all in its ninety-five-year history. It was still richly decorated and plushly upholstered in a hopelessly antique style, and Ernesto Galman revered it.

'I am sure that a professional gentleman such as yourself could afford to rent rooms like this as a single tenant?' The landlord smiled at Komensk ingratiatingly. 'We could come to an arrangement so that I wouldn't have to find another occupant to share with you?

Edward Clarke was staring out of the window of his bookshop, a cigarette held delicately between his long, thin fingers, his unshaven chin slightly upraised.

"Mrs. Taylor?" The greeting came from a woman sitting in a ponderous wingback chair by the front door. Because of the paperwork on her lap she could not immediately stand.

I awoke this morning in what appeared to be a strange house and I lay between unfamiliar sheets trying to remember exactly where I might be. I was not especially worried at first.

Maria said to him, 'I'd be tempted to rent the house for just this one room.' 'It is lovely, yes.' 'The way the light comes in from that window, through the curtains on to the plain walls . . .

When I look back on my life in Eastbourne in the late 1980s I find it amazing that I could have ever had enough time and energy to accomplish what I did.

If only we would take the time to look a little closer, delve a little deeper, when ordinary life goes awry, we might find the world more strange and unexpected than we ever could have imagined.

For the first time since his arrival in Arkos the Right Honourable David Barrett, M.P., was up early, washed and dressed and standing on the quay.

David Planer and I walked into the hotel bar through opposite doors and met in the middle of the room before anyone else could accost him.

At the edges of everyday life, on geographical boundaries and in the margins of society, certainties and realities can wear thin. And if we find ourselves in such occult and outland territory late at night, we might glimpse phenomena out of the corner of our eye that cannot possibly be there. At such times even the past, apparently fixed and unchanging in memories and dreams, cannot be relied upon. But what happens if we find ourselves passing beyond even these frayed perimeters of life? Can others follow us, or are we on our own?

When young Lucian Miller visits the house of a friend it is everything he had long fantasised about; decay and grandeur, lofty rooms, dark red shadows and dust. The evening, however, is a disaster, and Lucian finds himself apparently alone with the sophisticated but troubled Miranda Honeyman. They shut all of the doors in an attempt to keep their problems out, but it soon becomes apparent that someone else may have access to the house. On the threshold of adulthood, in a heightening atmosphere of sexual uncertainty and violence, Lucian tries to make sense of what is happening around him.

Mr Gabo was an unlikely looking author, but then most of their authors were unlikely looking. Asphodel Books always attracted the improbable.

: She was an odd-looking, insubstantial little thing; ill at ease in their company, sipping determinedly at a sparkling water that didn't seem to get any lower in her glass. Her attention was firmly fixed upon it.

I spent nearly forty years working for the District Council in their Housing Department, and now that I've retired I look back and wonder whether I wasted my life there?

Justin had been humiliated many times in front of his fellow students. On a regular basis they were all made to put their work up on the studio wall for a Criticism, when their tutors would patiently explain exactly how and why their art failed.

Marianne had no choice but to take the position of night porter at the St. Denis Hotel; it was either that or have her job-seeker's allowance cut because she had already turned down too many other offers of work.

Henry was back in his childhood bedroom for the first time in ten years and it was as though he had never been away.