“My greatest wish – other than salvation – was to have a book”

Life Of Pi

Yann Martel

“Dear Santa Claus, How have you been? How is your wife? I am not sure what I want for Christmas this year. Sometimes it is very hard to decide. Perhaps you should send me your catalogue”

Life According to Linus

Charles M. Schulz

“Daniel Rooke was quiet, moody, a man of few words. He had no memories other than of being an outsider . . . He had no evidence, but doggedly believed that there would one day be a place, somewhere in the world, for the person he was.”

The Lieutenant

Kate Grenville

“Dick leaves us in September and I feel sure he will receive your grateful prayers in his journey south, with the prayers of the faithful, that one day he shall return to Scotland and serve our Church in this dear land with perseverance, holiness, obedience and sacrifice”

Leaving Alexandria

“Hot blood smoked in the calcified winter air. Jack crouched on the ground like a muddy toad, cradling the rife and watching the stream of crimson like liquid fire”

Lawless

Matt Bondurant

“I don’t like questions. They invent the answers. The real answers are discovered, before you even know what the question is”

Laidlaw

William McIlvanney

“He crashed a dozen Cadillacs in one year and played the Apollo. With racial hatred burning in the headlines, the audience danced in the seats to a white boy from the bottomland”

Jerry Lee Lewis

Rick Bragg

“Losing your innocence has very little to do with virginity, you know. Loss of innocence comes when you have to deal with the real world by yourself, when you learn that the first rule of life is kill or be killed”

Lace

Shirley Conran

“I, the being in question, having spent nearly three hundred years lost as a pomegranate pip in a lake of aspic, amnesiac, bodiless and comatose, a nugget of spirit but nothing else, found myself quickening, gaining form and weight and, finally, consciousness”

Jacob's Folly

Rebecca Miller

“Islands are potent places, and for five hundred years this exemplary sea of islands in the imagination has proved irresistible to adventurers and poets and protestors and hedonists alike”

Island People

Joshua Jelly-Schapiro

“I hit play and heard a piece by Bach that I’d not heard before. And it took me to a place of such magnificence, such surrender, hope, beauty, infinite space, it was like touching God’s face”

Instrumental

James Rhodes

“This planet requires us to take actions to make our projects fly”

Insanely Gifted

Jamie Catto

“In the same way that the cosmos is larger than we ever imagined, we ourselves are something greater than we had intuited by introspection”

Incognito

David Eagleman

“I really can’t believe what a state the pyramids are in. I thought they had flat rendered sides, but when you get up close, you see how they’re like a massive game of Jenga that’s got out of hand”

An Idiot Abroad

Karl Pilkington

“Ghosts, werewolves and witches are just nonsense to frighten mugs like you. It’s men you should be afraid of, not monsters”

I'm Not Scared

Niccolò Ammaniti

“I will exile my thoughts if they think of you again, and I will rip my lips out if they say your name once more. Now if you do exist, I will tell you my final word in life or in death, I tell you goodbye”

Hunger

Knut Hamsun

“I know that some of you reading this are convinced humans are a myth, but I am here to state that they do actually exist”

The Humans

Matt Haig

“Don’t be satisfied until you’re too smart for your own good!”

How to be a Grrrl

Charles M. Schulz