globebooks - Tumblr blog

[globebooks]

"I suppose the important thing is to make some sort of difference," she said, "You know, actually change something."

[globebooks]

Mayya, forever immersed in her Singer sewing machine, seemed lost to the outside world.

[globebooks]

With a fidgety mind, the boy silently reeled off names of the stops in front of them, depots strung along the rails running south from where the river started.

[globebooks]

The story of how I, Julian Carter, and my precious two-year-old son, Stephen, came to be on that white sailboat, tossed about like a cork on a raging dark sea off the northern tip of Queensland in 1963, is harrowing, but it pales in comparison to being abandoned in that tempest.

[globebooks]

For as long as you could remember, your mother, my teta, taught you to tread carefully through life.

[globebooks]

On the seventieth anniversary of the Great October Socialist Revolution, Masha's grandmother, a rocket scientist, took Masha to the Church of St. John the Warrior in Central Moscow to be baptized.

[globebooks]

The monster stood not a tongue's length away, eyes fixed on our throats, shriveled brain crowded with fantasies of murder.

[globebooks]

When Saya sends a text to tell me she has a new boyfriend, I instantly write back: What's he like?

[globebooks]

We agreed to meet a few hours after the funeral.

[globebooks]

Prologue: "Behold: Kali tragus, the Russian thistle."

Chapter One: "'Welcome, my ultimate babes, you thieves and lovers, to the greatest spectacle this side of the Mississippi!'"

[globebooks]

The River Scheldt wound languidly from northern France through Belgium, taking a sharp westward turn at the port of Antwerp, where it became deep and wide enough to accommodate oceangoing ships.

[globebooks]

You wake up with the answer to the question that everyone asks.

[globebooks]

First things first, Grandpa's gone.

[globebooks]

Celia del Pino, equipped with binoculars and wearing her best housedress and drop pearl earrings, sits in her wicker swing guarding the north coast of Cuba.

[globebooks]

"Oh gosh, is that the time? Sorry, I have to go," the man mumbled evasively, as he stood up and reached for his bag.

[globebooks]

From a very young age, I suspected there was more to my world than I could see: somewhere in the streets of Istanbul, in a house resembling ours, there lived another Orhan so much like me that he could pass for my twin, even my double.

[globebooks]

When I first saw the Pera Palace, nearly twenty years ago, you had to have a rather specific reason for being in that section of Istanbul, like getting a lamp rewired or calling on a transgender prostitute.