How inevitable it is; we step into an ordinary moment and never come out again.

Women get the short shrift in history. It's been largely written and dictated by men, or at least men believe that we own it, and women have really been in those quieter moments at the edge of history. But, really, they're the ones who are turning the cogs and the wheels and allowing things like the peace process to happen.

The tunnels of our lives connect, coming to daylight at the oddest moments, and then plunge us into the dark again. We return to the lives of those who have gone before us, a perplexing möbius strip until we come home, eventually, to ourselves.

She's always thought that one of the beauties of New York is that you can be from anywhere and within moments of landing its yours.

Anakana Schofield is part of a new wave of wonderful Irish fiction-international in scope and electrically alive.

Yet she likes complications. She wishes she could turn and say: I like people who unbalance me.

...and it strikes her, as she walks, that borders, like hatred, are exaggerated precisely because otherwise they would cease to exist altogether.