The Magician’s Assistant: The Sunday Times best selling author of The Dutch House and Bel Canto, Winner of The Women’s Prize for Fiction

They were very entertaining—it was like watching magic tricks. Both she and Camilla talked about their husbands the way we talked about the sisters at school, revealing how cleverly they’d deceived them, even if they had innocent motives such as buying a dress or choosing where to spend a vacation. Giacinta claimed she’d managed to make her husband

She had so much and wanted to keep it all. She wanted to leave the father of her children without any relic of the last fifteen years. But that wasn’t the worst part about this. The worst part about this, other than all the other worst parts about this, was that it put Toby into a position where he had to actually think about what he wanted.

I tried to remember how Pinocchio had become a real boy. It had something to do with being in a whale, maybe saving his father’s life; I hadn’t done anything like that. But surely a woman was more complex than a puppet boy and she might become herself not once-and-for-all but cyclically: waxing, waning, sometimes disappearing altogether.