'The Marriage of Souls', like 'The Rationalist', is an exploration of humanist philosophy wrapped between the delicate leaves of an eighteenth-century tale. The story of the two novels - and they should be read as a two-volume work - centres around the old war-horse of boy meets girl, boy loses girl, boy finds girl. But what a boy and what a girl.
There's something unsettling about the education of a child who comfortably enumerates the rules for surviving zombie apocalypse but finds it uncomfortable to enumerate the rules of his grandparents' faith, if he knows them.
Who speaks to the instincts speaks to the deepest in mankind, and finds the readiest response.
While one finds company in himself and his pursuits, he cannot feel old, no matter what his years may be.
Bill Gates finds people in Russia to hire them to Microsoft. That's the Russian interest in this process.
I search for items that have history, like vintage finds - I love fur kitten-heel house slippers from the 1950s - and pieces from fashion houses that have been around for a long time, like Chanel and Dior.
In the story I eventually called 'Archangel' and published in 2008, Eudora MacEachern, working as an assistant to a surgeon at a hospital in Archangel, one night finds outside the gates an exhausted and frostbitten soldier crouched over the reins of a pony sleigh carrying the body of another soldier.
If out of all mankind one finds a single friend, he has found something more precious than any treasure, since there is nothing in the world so valuable that it can be compared to a real friend.
The director's task is to recreate life, its movement, its contradictions, its dynamic and conflicts. It is his duty to reveal every iota of the truth he has seen, even if not everyone finds that truth acceptable.
Finding the right person can be so hard that often, when a person finally finds someone she or he is comfortable with, she or he just makes it work.
