The SYLE Press
To his employers, he was a first-rate engineer. To his friends, he was something of a Don Juan. A more perceptive acquaintance described him as possessed of ‘a kind of bitter integrity’ … But beneath the front, the real Charles Hibson lay buried – deep.
Holly Ash – once a straggle of rural cottages a tram’s ride from Liverpool – has been transformed, Frank Bates discovers when he returns years later as local boy made good. Now a director of Amalgamated Cables, and son-in-law of the chairman, he is shocked to see that in place of Ash Cottages …
The Fratellini Winter they had called it, after the Italian scientist who had first detected the decline in solar radiation. The seasons pass and the cold bites ever harder. The Thames freezes over, stocks of food and fuel run low, and London falls under martial law. That first arctic winter, it seems, was only …
‘It is always nonsense for us that says some are chosen and others left to die. If that should be, it is better not to be chosen.’
‘You mean, we’re all chosen.’
‘No,’ Dadda said. ‘I mean, we are all left to die.’
One night, the island of Guernsey convulsed. As shock followed shock, the landscape tilted violently in defiance of gravity. When dawn came and the quakes had stilled to tremblings, Matthew Cotter gazed out in disbelief at the pile of rubble that had been his home…
London in the late forties: strange shifting times in the aftermath of the war. A motley sample of humanity has washed up on the shores of the down-at-heel boarding house that is 36 Regency Gardens, their mutual proximity enforced by shared impoverishment…
In 1949, Sam Youd – who would later go on, as John Christopher, to write The Death of Grass and The Tripods – published his first novel. As he later said:
I knew first novels tended to be autobiographical and was determined to avoid that. So my main character was a woman …
An Englishman’s home, supposedly, is his castle, and property developer Rod Gawfrey was incensed when a gang of hooligans gatecrashed his son’s party, infiltrating the luxury residence that was also home to his wife’s parents and her sister Jane.
When the storm rages and the avalanche cuts off power and phone lines, no one in the chalet is particularly bothered. There are kerosene lamps, a well-stocked bar and food supplies more than adequate to last them till the road to Nidenhaut can be opened up…
The Chung-Li virus has devastated Asia, wiping out the rice crop and leaving riots and mass starvation in its wake. The rest of the world looks on with concern, though safe in the expectation that a counter-virus will be developed any day. Then Chung-Li mutates and spreads…
‘Will you not drink some coffee?’ ‘Yes,’ Hibson said, ‘I think I will.’ He went to the table and poured himself a cup. ‘Thank you for bringing it up. I suppose you will have a...
Irina drove in silence as far as the main road. While waiting to turn right, she said: ‘Mademoiselle Limier is nice, isn’t she?’ ‘As far as I could judge.’ ‘And Andrew Tilling.’ It was a...
‘Tragedy isn’t a twentieth-century invention,’ Hibson said. ‘Think of your ’Fifteen and ’Forty-Five. There must have been hundreds of women who lost a husband in one and a son in the next. You won’t leave...
It was unreeling in his mind – an old cinematographic film, torn, stained, faded, but fresh and immediate for all that. For a moment he was afraid of it. But the recollection was private; it...
Tilling said quickly: ‘There were one or two quite good reviews. Of course, reviews don’t really mean much beyond a certain point.’ ‘They still sell all right?’ ‘On that one they increased the print order...
‘And your sister Angela?’ ‘She got married during the war. They have three children.’ ‘I remember her as the most beautiful person I have ever known.’ ‘She has a daughter,’ Hibson said, ‘very like her....
‘Are you married?’ ‘Yes, I’m married.’ ‘It doesn’t seem to have put you off your game.’ Leverett finished his whisky and stared at the empty glass. The tall waitress was leaning against the wooden ledge,...
Instead of going straight across, he detoured on to the Île Rousseau. On either side of the short connecting span, the ducks and geese and swans, in their separate pens, placidly scoured their soiled and...
Some yards away a solitary coot was paddling, with dogged persistence, against the flow. Its efforts appeared to match exactly the opposing pull of the water; in two or three minutes there was no sign...
The main road was empty; the tram-lines stretched for nearly half a mile in either direction, cold and bare in the fluorescent light. The nearest stop was on an island, less than twenty yards away....