Guin looked out from the carousel ride. Her dad and Esther had already wandered off. There was Esther’s son, Newton, standing by the nativity scene. He saw her looking and gave her a wave. Snow was falling steadily now and…

The promenade was deserted; the buildings gleamed like bone. Above the sea wall the lanterns glowed thinly. The wide dry river was flooded with grass, which swayed in the moonlight, rustling and glinting. Over the silted river, leaving a wake…

The white cottages multiplied as far as she could see, an unbroken shadowless terrace of them on each side of the road, beneath the lamps that looked exactly like household light-bulbs standing on their heads. Since there were no front…

The circular booths, the long target galleries, the low roller coaster, the ark and the crazy house draped shadow over each other and merged with the dimness of the paths between. Even the merry-go-round was hooded by darkness hanging from…

The dunes might have been exuding the dusk now. The sand that loomed above her to her left and stretched to the edge of the water on her right was losing its hold on its colour. As it began to…

Yet if you had walked past Newsham Park you might have wondered what there was to fear: why were children advancing, bold but wary, on the red-brick shelter by the twilit pool? Surely there could be no danger in the…

Someone’s wielding an umbrella at the near end of Lord Street, and somebody else is holding one outside a pub on the corner of James Street, among tables and chairs spitting rain. Their outfits look not just so haphazard that…

Though the Liverpool blitz had ended before I was born, all the bombed streets on this side of Kensington lay in ruins. Every roadway was strewn with fragments of houses, and the smell of stale fire caught in my throat.…

The mud was lying in wait for him. It swallowed his feet with an approving sound. It poured into his shoes, seeping into the plastic bags. It squeezed out from beneath unsteady paving stones, where there were any. He snarled…