‘On another night she might join the card game, but she didn’t have it in her to be sociable this evening, to be the carefree Irish girlfriend who loved a party, who smiled at their stories from home as if she recognised the places and people alternately lauded and reviled within.’

‘He still looks like a normal human in front of her, albeit with a well-fitted coat, suited to his frame, to his needs. What does he do in summer, she wonders, what does he do in changing rooms? What does he do in bed? What if he rolls over and kills it?’

‘If you’re going to be a novelist, you write something that is recognisably a novel and that means accepting at least some and probably most of the rules of novels, which include some form of plot and setting because there is nothing without time and space, and some form of narrative because that’s how it is, that’s why readers and writers turn up.’

'Swallows are everywhere. Golondrinas, I say to myself and remember the day on the balcony when Pilar taught me that word. She used to praise them for eating the mosquitos in summer. The balcony, with its view over the town and valley, the factories and slaughterhouses, el río Cinca, and its dry tributary el río Sosa. High on the hill above us, the castle.'

'And so she took off, curving round the cliffs of Sully Bay. She kept going, tumbling over the boundless, silver sea, flying farther than she’d been in years. Finally, summoning the courage to fish again, she swooped, and she dove—but she failed.'

Gregor Montgomery, she said, sweeping her palm to behold the clouds. He was the one who set that night sky alight.