He has found himself more and more reliant on her at exactly the point that she has become less available to him.

It's hard to overestimate the teenage appetite for high drama.

To have had fame, even very minor fame, and to have lost it, got older and maybe put on a little weight is a kind of living death.

He put one hand lightly on the back of her neck and simultaneously she placed one hand lightly on his hip, and they kissed in the street as all around them people hurried home in the summer light, and it was the sweetest kiss that either of them would ever know. This is where it all begins. Everything starts here, today. And then it was over.

As soon as she'd met him at the arrivals gate on his return from Thailand, lithe and brown and shaven-headed, she knew that there was no chance of a relationship between them. Too much had happened to him, too little had happened to her.

As a novelist, I'm incredibly lucky to make a living, but that doesn't mean that I don't lie awake at four o'clock in the morning, worrying.

Their friendship was like a wilted bunch of flowers that she insisted on topping up with water. Why not let it die instead?