He sat at the back, feeling like this was worse than story time at school. At least there was a carpet and the teacher didn’t try to do different, terrible voices. At least you saw her face. This time the changing voice of many accents was hidden. It sounded like a man but how could…

I watched Bridge of Spies again a couple of weeks ago and something stuck with me. When the lawyer defending Rudolf Abel, an alleged KGB spy, asks him if he is worried, he replies, ‘will it help?’ Of all the things I’d like to change about myself, giving up worrying is definitely top of the…

She could do it. Sure if she had got through being on the ward during the blitz, this was child’s play. They didn’t know that she had only been driving for two weeks, and hadn’t learnt how to put the car into reverse. She had never been to this house before. The lanes got increasingly…

Yesterday I stood outside a small independently run bookshop and didn’t go in. I could have introduced myself and talked about the books I’ve published.

He checked the empty windows. He listened for approaching footsteps but he guessed he’d be in luck. The fuss his sister was making over her Sunday outfit was distraction enough for everyone else. He held his breath, reached up his grubby hand to the key and turned it. Click. He was free! No church for…

With both hands. Last week I was struggling to stand up and get things done. When my two washed and dried the dishes, when my other half did countless tasks for me, I was overcome with a feeling of being cared for.

It was one hundred and three, or if someone got in his way, one hundred and six steps down to the shore. He always took his time – a deliberate setting of one battered DM shoe in front of the other. The way was mostly hazard-free, the path was a gentle, paved slope and then…

In my last book, The Lost Things, one of my characters uses the ideology of the hundredth sheep to inform her attitude towards every individual that crosses her path. In the New Testament parable, the shepherd leaves his other 99 sheep to search for the lost one. It’s the idea that each person is worth…

The only thing he had done wrong was want back what was his anyway. Mrs B had thought she’d put it out of reach, on top of a cupboard at least twice his height. But as he watched her, his face wet with hot tears, he noticed the wobble. They all sat cross-legged on scratchy…

Your bad experiences stop you from trying again.