Still Life: The instant Sunday Times bestseller and BBC Between the Covers Book Club pick

the significance doesn’t matter. The historical significance deadens it. Across those unbridgeable distances—between bird and painter, painting and viewer—I hear only too well what’s being said to me, a psst from an alleyway as Hobie put it, across four hundred years of time, and it’s really very personal and specific. It’s there in the light-rinse

That life—whatever else it is—is short. That fate is cruel but maybe not random. That Nature (meaning Death) always wins but that doesn’t mean we have to bow and grovel to it. That maybe even if we’re not always so glad to be here, it’s our task to immerse ourselves anyway: wade straight through it, right through the cesspool, while keeping eyes an

It struck him that he’d never been so happy, but was wise enough to understand that his happiness consisted largely of hope. Their meeting in the ruin had been intimate and strange, and had sustained his spirit for days; but quickly they’d reverted to their easy pretence of being boys with a mystery on their hands. So they spoke only of where Maria

What a world, Sadie thought. People once made glass sculptures of decay, and they put these sculptures in museums. How strange and beautiful human beings are. And how fragile.