نثر

Chapter 1 - Miracles

Who am I? And how, I wonder, will this story end?

The sun has come up and I am sitting by a window that is foggy with the breath of a life gone by. I'm a sight this morning: two shirts, heavy pants, a scarf wrapped twice around my neck and tucked into a thick sweater knitted by my daughter thirty birthdays ago. The thermostat in my room is set as high as it will go, and a smaller space heater sits directly behind me. It clicks and groans and spits out dry air that smells like singed hair, but at least it's warm.

Prologue

When I was seventeen, my life changed forever.

I know that there are people in this world who do not love their fellow human beings, and I hate people like that. There are people who are born cynics and never see the good in anyone or anything. But I also know that there are people who see the world differently, who believe in the goodness of others, who have faith that love can conquer all.

Chapter 1 - Lou

There are 158 footsteps between the bus stop and home, but it can stretch to 180 if you aren't in a hurry, like maybe if you're wearing platform shoes. Or if you want to avoid the man who sits outside the newsagent and always seems to have a can of lager in his hand even though it's 7:30 in the morning.

I turned the corner into our street (68 steps), and could see the house from here. Dad was probably up, having his cup of tea and listening to the radio. Mum would be getting Granddad's breakfast ready and checking that his medication was laid out on the little table by his chair.

Chapter 1

It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife.

However little known the feelings or views of such a man may be on his first entering a neighbourhood, this truth is so well fixed in the minds of the surrounding families, that he is considered the rightful property of some one or other of their daughters.

Chapter 1 - A New Beginning

The year was 1945, and Claire Randall was on her second honeymoon with her husband Frank in the Scottish Highlands.

She had no idea that touching an ancient stone circle would change her life forever.

Chapter 1 - Love Out of Time

Henry DeTamble has a rare genetic disorder that causes him to involuntarily travel through time.

Clare Abshire has been in love with Henry since she was six years old.

Chapter 1 - Learning to Love

Stella Lane was brilliant with numbers but struggled with people.

As an econometrician with Asperger's, she approached everything analytically, including her love life.

Chapter 1 - Diplomatic Incident

Alex Claremont-Diaz was the First Son of the United States, and he had a problem.

His problem had a name: Prince Henry of Wales.

Chapter 1 - The Interview

Monique Grant couldn't believe she'd been chosen to interview the legendary Evelyn Hugo.

"Why me?" she asked the reclusive movie star.

Chapter 1 - Writer's Block

January Andrews used to believe in happily ever after, until her father's death revealed his secret affair.

Now she was stuck with writer's block and a beach house she couldn't afford to keep.

Chapter 1 - Office Warfare

Lucy Hutton and Joshua Templeman hated each other with the fire of a thousand suns.

They sat across from each other every day, playing their little games of psychological warfare.

Chapter 1 - Completely Fine

Eleanor Oliphant was completely fine, thank you very much.

She had her routines, her weekend phone calls with Mummy, and her job in accounts.

Chapter 1 - Wedding Disaster

Olive Torres had the worst luck in the world, especially when it came to her twin sister's fiancé's brother, Ethan.

"Why does he have to be so perfect and so annoying at the same time?" she complained to her sister Ami.

Chapter 1 - Desperate Measures

Catalina Martín was in trouble. Big trouble.

She had lied to her family about having a boyfriend, and now she needed to produce one for her sister's wedding in Spain.

Chapter 1 - The Last Vacation

Poppy Wright and Alex Nilsen had been best friends for ten years.

Every summer, they took a vacation together, despite being complete opposites.

Chapter 1 - Note to Self

Tiffy needed a cheap place to live, and Leon needed extra money.

The solution: share a flat but never meet. Leon worked nights, Tiffy worked days.

Chapter 1 - The Runaway Princess

Princess Lia had had enough of being told what to do.

On her wedding day, she ran away from the arranged marriage and her royal duties.

Chapter 1 - The Proposal

Vanessa Mazur had been Aiden Graves' personal assistant for two years.

He was a professional football player known as 'The Wall of Winnipeg' - massive, silent, and intimidating.

Chapter 1 - Fish Out of Water

Calla Fletcher was a Toronto city girl through and through.

When she learned her estranged father was dying in Alaska, she knew she had to go.

Chapter 1 - New Beginnings

Lily Bloom had just moved to Boston to start her own business.

On a rooftop, she met Ryle Kincaid, a neurosurgeon who was everything she thought she wanted.

Chapter 1 - Stolen Choices

Francesca Rossi's life was decided for her before she was even born.

She would marry Wolfe Keaton to unite their families' business empires.

Chapter 1 - After Death

Maali Almeida woke up dead, which was inconvenient for several reasons.

He was a photographer, a gambler, and secretly gay in 1990s Sri Lanka.

Chapter 1 - The Curse

Addie LaRue had been alive for 300 years, and no one remembered her name.

In 1714, she made a deal with a dark entity to escape an unwanted marriage.

Chapter 1 - The Assignment

Linus Baker lived a quiet, orderly life as a caseworker for the Department in Charge of Magical Youth.

His days were predictable until he received an unusual assignment.

Chapter 1 - The Plan

Nora Stephens was a literary agent who had her life perfectly planned.

She was supposed to be the villain in someone else's love story - the career-focused woman who gets left behind.

Chapter 1 - Time Slip

Clementine West inherited an apartment that sometimes slipped through time.

Most days it was normal, but occasionally she'd find herself seven years in the past.

Chapter 1 - Solo Journey

Dave had planned the perfect European trip with his girlfriend Clara.

Then she broke up with him two weeks before departure.

Chapter 1 - Coming Home

Sophie Brunet hadn't been home to Merinac in five years.

Now her family's restaurant was failing, and they needed her help.

Chapter 1 - The Invitation

Mika Moon was a witch who had always lived alone.

Witches weren't supposed to live together - it was too dangerous.

Chapter 1 - The Curse

Emilia Antonelli had always believed in the family curse.

Second daughters in her family were doomed to never find love.

Chapter 1 - The Letter

Harold Fry received a letter that changed everything.

It was from Queenie Hennessy, a colleague from twenty years ago.

Chapter 1 - The Perfect Wedding

Jules and Will were having the perfect wedding on a remote Irish island.

The guest list was carefully curated - family, friends, and colleagues.

Chapter 1 - The Library

Odile Souchet dreamed of working at the American Library in Paris.

In 1939, she finally got her chance.

Chapter 1 - Paris Dreams

Andras Lévi arrived in Paris in 1937 with nothing but dreams and a scholarship to architecture school.

He was young, Hungarian, and Jewish in a world growing increasingly dangerous.

On an exceptionally hot evening early in July a young man came out of the garret in which he lodged in S. Place and walked slowly, as though in hesitation, towards K. bridge.

He had successfully avoided meeting his landlady on the staircase. His garret was under the roof of a high, five-storied house and was more like a cupboard than a room. The landlady who provided him with garret, dinners, and attendance, lived on the floor below, and every time he went out he was obliged to pass her kitchen, the door of which invariably stood open. And each time he passed, the young man had a sick, frightened feeling, which made him scowl and feel ashamed. He was hopelessly in debt to his landlady, and was afraid of meeting her.

This was not because he was cowardly and abject, quite the contrary; but for some time past he had been in an overstrained irritable condition, verging on hypochondria. He had become so completely absorbed in himself, and isolated from his fellows that he dreaded meeting, not only his landlady, but anyone at all. He was crushed by poverty, but the anxieties of his position had of late ceased to weigh upon him. He had given up attending to matters of practical importance; he had lost all desire to do so. Nothing that any landlady could do had a real terror for him. But to be stopped on the stairs, to be forced to listen to her trivial, irrelevant gossip, to pestering demands for payment, threats and complaints, and to rack his brains for excuses, to prevaricate, to lie—no, rather than that, he would creep down the stairs like a cat and slip out unseen.

"Trust thyself: every heart vibrates to that iron string."

There is a time in every man's education when he arrives at the conviction that envy is ignorance; that imitation is suicide; that he must take himself for better, for worse, as his portion; that though the wide universe is full of good, no kernel of nourishing corn can come to him but through his toil bestowed on that plot of ground which is given to him to till.

The power which resides in him is new in nature, and none but he knows what that is which he can do, nor does he know until he has tried.

Nature is the incarnation of a thought, and turns to a thought again, as ice becomes water and gas.

Standing on the bare ground,—my head bathed by the blithe air and uplifted into infinite space,—all mean egotism vanishes. I become a transparent eyeball; I am nothing; I see all; the currents of the Universal Being circulate through me.

Nature is not fixed but fluid. Spirit alters, moulds, makes it. The immobility or bruteness of nature is the absence of spirit; to pure spirit it is fluid, it is volatile, it is obedient.

Where do we find ourselves? In a series of which we do not know the extremes, and believe that it has none.

We wake and find ourselves on a stair; there are stairs below us, which we seem to have ascended; there are stairs above us, many a one, which go upward and out of sight.

All our days are so unprofitable while they pass, that 'tis wonderful where or when we ever got anything of this which we call wisdom, poetry, virtue.

The eye is the first circle; the horizon which it forms is the second; and throughout nature this primary figure is repeated without end.

Our life is an apprenticeship to the truth that around every circle another can be drawn; that there is no end in nature, but every end is a beginning.

There are no fixtures in nature. The universe is fluid and volatile. Permanence is but a word of degrees.

The law of nature is: Do the thing, and you shall have the power; but they who do not the thing have not the power.

Every excess causes a defect; every defect an excess. Every sweet hath its sour; every evil its good.

For everything you have missed, you have gained something else; and for everything you gain, you lose something else.

I went to the woods to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.

I did not wish to live what was not life, living is so dear; nor did I wish to practice resignation, unless it was quite necessary. I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life.

The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation. What is called resignation is confirmed desperation.

That government is best which governs least; and I should like to see it acted up to more rapidly and systematically.

Unjust laws exist; shall we be content to obey them, or shall we endeavor to amend them, and obey them until we have succeeded, or shall we transgress them at once?

Under a government which imprisons any unjustly, the true place for a just man is also a prison.

The ways by which you may get money almost without exception lead downward.

If a man walk in the woods for love of them half of each day, he is in danger of being regarded as a loafer; but if he spends his whole day as a speculator, shearing off those woods and making earth bald before her time, he is esteemed an industrious and enterprising citizen.

The aim of the laborer should be, not to get his living, to get 'a good job,' but to perform well a certain work.

I wish to speak a word for Nature, for absolute freedom and wildness, as contrasted with a freedom and culture merely civil.

In Wildness is the preservation of the World.

I think that I cannot preserve my health and spirits, unless I spend four hours a day at least—and it is commonly more than that—sauntering through the woods and over the hills and fields.

It is remarkable how closely the history of the apple tree is connected with that of man.

The era of the Wild Apple will soon be past. It is a fruit which will probably become extinct in New England.

Our wild apple is wild only like myself, perchance, who belong not to the aboriginal race here, but have strayed into the woods from the cultivated stock.

I can resist everything except temptation.

The one charm of marriage is that it makes a life of deception absolutely necessary for both parties.

When poverty comes in at the door, love flies out of the window.

The chief advantage that would result from the establishment of Socialism is, undoubtedly, the fact that Socialism would relieve us from that sordid necessity of living for others.

With the abolition of private property, then, we shall have true, beautiful, healthy Individualism. Nobody will waste his life in accumulating things, and the symbols for things.

Art is the most intense mode of individualism that the world has known.

The highest criticism is more creative than creation, and the primary aim of the critic is to see the object as in itself it really is not.

It is through Art, and through Art only, that we can realise our perfection; through Art, and through Art only, that we can shield ourselves from the sordid perils of actual existence.

The one duty we owe to history is to rewrite it.

Life imitates Art far more than Art imitates Life.

Lying, the telling of beautiful untrue things, is the proper aim of Art.

Nature is so uncomfortable. Grass is hard and lumpy and damp, and full of dreadful black insects.

There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written, or badly written. That is all.

The fact of a man being a poisoner is nothing against his prose.

One can fancy an intense personality being created out of sin.

Always obey your parents, when they are present. This is the best policy in the long run, because if you don't, they will make you.

Most parents think they know better than you do, and you can generally make more by humoring that superstition than you can by acting on your own better judgment.

Be respectful to your superiors, if you have any, also to strangers, and sometimes to others.

Its name is Public Opinion. It is held in reverence. It settles everything. Some think it the Voice of God.

We all do no end of feeling, and we mistake it for thinking. And out of it we get an aggregation which we consider a boon. Its name is Public Opinion.

A man without a party is an outcast. He cannot even get a chance to betray something.

It was a time of great and exalting excitement. The country was up in arms, the war was on, in every breast burned the holy fire of patriotism.

O Lord our Father, our young patriots, idols of our hearts, go forth to battle—be Thou near them! With them—in spirit—we also go forth from the sweet peace of our beloved firesides to smite the foe.

O Lord our God, help us to tear their soldiers to bloody shreds with our shells; help us to cover their smiling fields with the pale forms of their patriot dead.

Man is a machine. A machine is not responsible for its actions.

Training is everything. The peach was once a bitter almond; cauliflower is nothing but cabbage with a college education.

There are no self-made men. We are made up of thousands of others.

Strange! that you should not have suspected years ago—centuries, ages, eons, ago!—for you have existed, companionless, through all the eternities.

Nothing exists; all is a dream. God—man—the world—the sun, the moon, the wilderness of stars—a dream, all a dream; they have no existence.

You are but a thought—a vagrant thought, a useless thought, a homeless thought, wandering forlorn among the empty eternities!

A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction.

For most of history, Anonymous was a woman.

Yet it is in our idleness, in our dreams, that the submerged truth sometimes comes to the top.

Examine for a moment an ordinary mind on an ordinary day. The mind receives a myriad impressions—trivial, fantastic, evanescent, or engraved with the sharpness of steel.

Life is not a series of gig lamps symmetrically arranged; life is a luminous halo, a semi-transparent envelope surrounding us from the beginning of consciousness to the end.

The proper stuff of fiction does not exist; everything is the proper stuff of fiction, every feeling, every thought; every quality of brain and spirit is drawn upon.

Moths that fly by day are not properly to be called moths; they do not excite that pleasant sense of dark autumn nights and ivy-blossom which the commonest yellow-underwing asleep in the shadow of the curtain never fails to rouse in us.

The same energy which inspired the rooks, the ploughmen, the horses, and even, it seemed, the lean bare-backed downs, sent the moth fluttering from side to side of his square of the window-pane.

One could only watch the extraordinary efforts made by those tiny legs against an oncoming doom which could, had it chosen, have submerged an entire city, not merely a city, but masses of human beings; nothing, I knew, had any chance against death.

No one perhaps has ever felt passionately towards a lead pencil. But there are circumstances in which it can become supremely desirable to possess one; moments when we are set upon having an object, an excuse for walking half across London.

The eye is not a miner, not a diver, not a seeker after buried treasure. It floats us smoothly down a stream; resting, pausing, the brain sleeps perhaps as it looks.

Into each of these lives one could penetrate a little way, far enough to give oneself the illusion that one is not tethered to a single mind, but can put on briefly for a few minutes the bodies and minds of others.

From this I reach what I might call a philosophy; at any rate it is a constant idea of mine; that behind the cotton wool is hidden a pattern; that we—I mean all human beings—are connected with this; that the whole world is a work of art; that we are parts of the work of art.

A great part of every day is not lived consciously. One walks, eats, sees things, deals with what has to be done; the broken vacuum cleaner; ordering dinner; writing orders to Mabel; washing; cooking dinner; bookbinding.

These are the moments of being. They are always a shock; they are always accompanied by a peculiar horror and a physical collapse; they seem dominant; myself passive.

Most people who bother with the matter at all would admit that the English language is in a bad way, but it is generally assumed that we cannot by conscious action do anything about it.

Our civilization is decadent and our language—so the argument runs—must inevitably share in the general collapse.

It follows that any struggle against the abuse of language is a sentimental archaism, like preferring candles to electric light or hansom cabs to aeroplanes.

In Moulmein, in lower Burma, I was hated by large numbers of people—the only time in my life that I have been important enough for this to happen to me.

I was sub-divisional police officer of the town, and in an aimless, petty kind of way anti-European feeling was very bitter.

No one had the guts to raise a riot, but if a European woman went through the bazaars alone somebody would probably spit betel juice over her dress.

North Richmond Street, being blind, was a quiet street except at the hour when the Christian Brothers' School set the boys free.

An uninhabited house of two storeys stood at the blind end, detached from its neighbours in a square ground.

The other houses of the street, conscious of decent lives within them, gazed at one another with brown imperturbable faces.

Snow was general all over Ireland.

It was falling on every part of the dark central plain, on the treeless hills, falling softly upon the Bog of Allen and, farther westward, softly falling into the dark mutinous Shannon waves.

It was falling, too, upon every part of the lonely churchyard on the hill where Michael Furey lay buried.