The Retreat Quotes

“The crowd clapped and cheered with thunderous applause. Some of the adults had begun to wail, including Hattie. All that pain – the loss of her friends, their betrayals, and the life she’d been denied by that terrible pandemic – that excruciating pain pulsed through her veins and made its way out her lungs, screaming, screaming and screaming, hysterically, as she ceded control to that wonderful orator. Commander Tommy’s words were like a song, the way he composed them.”
― Louis Saunders, The Retreat

“The Commander stood directly opposite her. He smiled with a feigned understanding, and his empty eyes gleamed with a phoney compassion – until his face turned to snarl and his fist slammed the stand.”
― Louis Saunders, The Retreat

“Dry heather plains flanked the lonely road. Rolling hills curtained off the horizon. Despite having never been here before, all was familiar in the young lad’s head. An inexplicable malaise surged through him as the cars passed an old fuel station, its forecourt empty, and the seashell logo faded from the entrance sign.”
― Louis Saunders, The Retreat

“He and Hattie had once been genuinely close, but ever since puberty, Jasper had been reduced to the level of a satellite, watching his friends as they breezed through their adolescence. He’d always taken a detached interest in it all, thinking, in his anxious disconnect from the others, that he was somehow better off compared to them – but, all in all, he had little to show for his time on this Earth, apart from just sort of being ‘there’.”
― Louis Saunders, The Retreat