A Ladder to the Sky

by John Boyne

but a life alone, where I was in control of my own movements and decisions, was my natural state.

One said that literature was more important than human life so what was the problem if a few people had died in the pursuit of excellence?

One declared that he had originally considered The Tribesman to be a masterpiece, but now that he knew it had actually been written by a woman, he was revising that opinion and realized that it was just a tedious piece of domestic trivia, driven by sentimentality.