Its impossible to control the reception of your work - the only thing you can control is the experience of writing itself, and the work you create.

All that sunny afternoon, traveling north and east, Caroline believed absolutely in the future. And why not? For if the worst had already happened to them in the eyes of the world, then surely, surely, it was the worst that they left behind them now.

You can't spend the rest of your life tiptoeing around to try and avert disaster. It won't work. You'll just end up missing the life you have.

That there were other worlds, invisible, unknown, beyond imagination even, was a revelation to him.

Then she had been a fiancee, a young wife, and a mother, and she had discovered that these words were far too small ever to contain the experience.

He had never even glimpsed her.

A fear Paul had transformed all these years, like a gifted alchemist, into anger and rebellion.