I’d only driven my car in the dark since it had been to the garage last week. Until yesterday. At half past eleven I got in and saw a black hole in the dashboard. Huh? Uh, yes. For real. Right where the radio was supposed to be. Obviously I started ...

For a long time, I thought every family in our country lived just like the ones in Libelle, one the weekly women’s magazines. Everyone except us. I was gutted. I wanted so badly to be just like them. My mother never knitted soft-coloured jumpers lik...

There’s just no end to the plums There must be a thousand hanging from the branches, and if you so much as touch one, twenty of them drop to the ground. We gather them up, my niece and I, and toss them into big buckets. She’s eight and staying over ...