Knife: The #1 Sunday Times bestselling account of survival, recovery, and the triumph of love over darkness

On such coin-toss moments a life can turn. Chance determines our fates at least as profoundly as choice, or those nonexistent notions karma, qismat, “destiny.

“The Distance of the Moon,” Italo Calvino’

One day, we visited Arezzo and looked at the frescoes of Piero della Francesca and paid our respects to the statue of Guido d’Arezzo, who invented the modern system of musical notation, the staves and clefs and the rest of it.

Tex Avery’s cartoon Billy Boy,

The journey across the frontier from Poetryland into Proseville often seemed to go through Memoiristan. Memoirs in this literary moment have become a major art form, allowing our perceptions of the present to be remade through the personal life experiences, the extraordinary pasts, of memoirists. (Just one recent example might be Safiya Sinclair’s

Knives. Knives in favorite movies, Polanski’s Knife in the Water, a fable about violence and infidelity. Knives in favorite books. Philip Pullman’s “subtle knife” that can cut openings between worlds and allow the bearer to traverse multiple realities. And of course the butcher’s knife with which the protagonist of Kafka’s The Trial is killed on th

I believe that art is a waking dream. And that imagination can bridge the gulf between dreams and reality and allow us to understand the real in new ways by seeing it through the lens of the unreal.