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“... From the mansion staircase the marble floor is a chessboard And she is a round plump pawn moving from square to square Scrubbing that floor clean, While up above, the detective watches her As rounds of light pick out this object and that, Saying: this belongs to the guilty party, As does this, and this, and this, And on the chessboard that is his mind, He moves them from place to place, and in minutes The guilty one has sunk into the floor, knee-deep While the innocent erratically and guiltily ascend Like angels newly made ...”

“... I thought all I felt was annoyance, not even anger, So many plans to change, we were in the wrong country, On the other side of an ocean, words get changed Coming through water, I thought, don’t tell me this, I don’t want to hear it, I thought it’s wrong To tell me my father died while I’m standing Here naked and wet, wrapped in a towel, my hair wet, You don’t talk to a daughter about her father While she’s naked and wet, it isn’t proper, Don’t you have any sense, I remember giving my mother Black net stockings, she was always So proud of her legs, even after the stove burned them, I have her legs, and he said, Next you’ll be standing On street corners holding a red bag, I always wondered Why a red bag, she gave them back to me and I wore them Everywhere, she never wore them, and then everyone around me Was crying, and it was like being in a wood where the trees, Swayed by wind, wept and wept, while I stood like a stick, Motionless, dry, and it took me some time to understand I was the wind and the branches in this wood Would be lashing forever, I could walk into this wood whenever I pleased, but the weather would never change here, And today I remember everything, the colour of the towel, Beige, the colour of the dust of the road in the summer In front of our house, the colour of the dust that settles All winter as the wood stove burns, it burns up a whole wood, But it won’t burn up this one, you might as well Have been the hunter who comes with a club And bludgeons baby seals, their bodies, Were all around me as you talked, it’s not worth being The messenger, is it, someone had to do it, and all I thought was, There are six people coming to dinner and my hair is still Wet, why make up a story like this, my father fell From a ski lift ...”

“... A well-known author with reason to suspect people who arrive bearing gifts of extravagant praise likes to tell this story. An African woman who had just had a child saw someone approaching her hut intending to view her new infant and compliment it. The mother ran as fast as she could, hid the baby, and in its place substituted a stone, which she wrapped in the baby’s blanket ...”

“... In Lost Children Polly Toynbee has, for reasons she never makes clear, interviewed many – she does not say how many – adopted children who, after the Children’s Act of 1975 was passed, set out in search of their biological parents. Her book presents us with nine ‘case-studies’ of children who searched for and found their parents, not always with happy results ...”

“... than on the young man up from the provinces, or the young woman affronting her destiny. Both Susan FrombergSchaeffer and Maureen Howard are established novelists in mid-career, and so are the heroines of their latest novels. The protagonist of Mainland, one of the three novels by ...”

“... and take off for some breathtaking realm. On the evidence of two novels, it would seem that Susan FrombergSchaeffer has a good range of narrative tones at her command. The Madness of a Seduced Woman – first published in America in 1983 – is very full and informative about the suffering inflicted on inflamed ...”

“... standards of evidence to novels about Vietnam? It would be an interesting experiment to disguise Schaeffer’s novel under a male pseudonym (‘a searing novel of grace under pressure by former sergeant Jack Schaeffer’): I suspect it would be experienced as a radically different work. Buffalo Afternoon chronicles ...”