The dinner invitation was totally unexpected since Josiah Gorgas had not heard from his high school and college buddy Austin Ervin in well over a decade.

Dessie O'Connell was 6 feet 3, thick of bone, and naturally muscular. Unlike almost all of the actors with whom he'd first competed for parts, he hardly needed to work out in order to resemble a Hellenic god.

Though he would normally look away from such people, for some reason he kept examining them from the back of the elevator. Do I know these losers? He wondered.

My mum is the undisputed tea-drinking heavyweight champion of the world… or at least the whole of South Lexington Avenue.

“Guess who’s coming to the campus coliseum?” Zora greeted Zarius in the hall with a wide-eyed grin as he left the classroom.

The spark of his life was fading, but his mind was still sharp, and his memories cocooned him.

Olly Rice had given his life to literature, but what had literature given him? A wound in the head that oozed something worse than blood or brain matter.

There was a lot at stake. Too much to lose. They reckon we all have our price, and Algy knew mine.