A game of Scrabble has serious consequences.

A semi-barbaric king devises a semi-barabaric (but entirely fair) method of criminal trial involving two doors, a beautiful lady and a very hungry tiger.

Yesterday’s air sucked out, tidied and smoothed for re-use.

But in my head that summer before we moved into the town was yellow and purple and red and supremely happy

It was Christmas the first time they made love; he said it felt like coming home

You have to play the cards you're dealt

She said she was crying tears of happiness. That’s when I learnt that happiness could make you cry too.

"I love you, Martha, but you break things. You're breaking us."

But when their father was killed, the dynamic of their relationship changed...

Snow fell steadily in the wild woods of Siberia...

“Hello, sir. How may I help you?”

What would you do if your family preferred a robot over you?

They said I sat on the bottom like an astronaut floating in space...

It being the last Thursday of the month, the greatest witch in Ireland had gone to the hairdressers and would not return for another hour

He dances maida maida, like a butterfly around the candle.

The famous lexical semanticist Professor Edgar Nettleston had been found dead, a gunshot wound to the head.

How many people who turn on a light understand the generation of electricity?

"That tree," he says. "It's looking at me."

I am looking at something I thought mine alone...a beech leaf, brittle and brown now.

For my fifteenth birthday, Granddad took me to Brown’s.