When Dove moves up from a canter to a gallop, sometimes the only way I can tell the difference is because her hooves pound a four-time rhythm instead of a three. But when Corr moves into a gallop, it's as if it's a gait that's just been invented, something so much faster than all the others that it should be called something else...Each stride feels like it takes us a mile. We'll run out of island before he runs out of speed. We're giants, on his back.

We don't have time to be sad

She doesn't know any better, what a girl like her needs is a man with both his legs on the land. A man who will hold her down so that she doesn't fly away. She doesn't know yet that someone like you looks better on the shelf than in your hand.

It seemed like the best weapons in my life had always been the most innocuous: empty plastic bins, a blank CD, an unmarked syringe, my smile in a dark room.

When he kissed me, his lips soft and careful, it was all the thrill of our first kiss and all the practiced familiarity of the accumulated memory of all our kisses.

My most memorable adventure was investigating the chalk cliffs in Yorkshire. While clambering over kelp-covered boulders half-covered by the sea, I fell and smashed my tail bone on one of them.

I'd learned a long time ago that one of the finest weapons in my arsenal was my ability to invade personal space