In a healthy individual, a broken bone that has healed properly is strongest where it was once broken. You have not lost any life, Henry told himself. You will still get your fair share of years. Yet the quality of his life changed. Once you've been struck by violence, you acquire companions that never leave you entirely: Suspicion, Fear, Anxiety, Despair, Joylessness. The natural smile is taken from you and the natural pleasures you once enjoyed lose their appeal.

That's what fiction is about, isn't it, the selective transforming of reality? The twisting of it to bring out its essence?

I have a story that will make you believe in God.

Words are cold, muddy toads trying to understand sprites dancing in a field-but they're all we have.

Colonialism is a terrible bane for a people upon whom it is imposed, but a blessing for a language. English's drive to exploit the new and the alien, its zeal in robbing words from other languages, its incapacity to feel qualms over the matter, its museum-size overabundance of vocabulary, it shoulder-shrug approach to spelling, its don't-worry-be-happy concern for grammar-the result was a language whose colour and wealth Henry loved.

Faith in God is an opening up, a letting go, a deep trust, a free act of love - but sometimes it was so hard to love.

It is life's only true opponent. Only fear can defeat life.