Richard Derus

“Nothing, absolutely nothing since I found myself washed up, semi-conscious, on the Traigh Losgaintir, has made sense. My memory loss. My failure to find a single clue to my identity, beyond my name, even in my own home. My affair with Sally. The book on the Flannan Isles mystery that I am not writing. Beehives on the coffin road. My missing boat...someone trying to kill me. And someone else stepping in to save me. The weight of it all is very nearly crushing.”
― Peter May

“I have no idea where this is. And for the first time since consciousness has returned, I am aware, with a sudden, sharp and painful stab of trepidation, that I have not the least notion of who I am.

That breathless realisation banishes all else. The cold, the taste of salt, the acid still burning all the way up from my stomach. How can I not know who I am? A temporary confusion, surely? But the longer I stand here, with the wind whistling around my ears, shivering almost beyond control, feeling the pain and the cold and the consternation, I realise that the only sense that has not returned to me is my sense of self. As if I inhabit the body of a stranger, in whose uncharted waters I have been washed up in blind ignorance.”
― Peter May

“For sure I didn't want to live the same life I'd been living. I craved revolutionary changes in my life. Violent changes, even. I felt like I was exercising a new muscle in my body. My body began to conform to my new way of thinking. Each day my body grew more loose-limbed and intuitive. It grew more sensitive to things. Trivial things at first, like the way my clothes felt against my skin as I walked along. Then larger things, too, and larger-than-large things—profound things, even—like the boundless sky at dusk when work was done.”
― Claire Oshetsky, Evil Genius

“Ilya wanted to tell Shane that it had been one of the best days of his life. It had been awkward”
― Rachel Reid, Heated Rivalry