“Blithe Spirit” - an excerpt from Normal Rules Don’t Apply by Kate Atkinson.

My day is off to a good start with this excerpt from Normal Rules Don’t Apply, a new book by Kate Atkinson. I’ve added it to my must read list.

Mandy had forgotten something. She didn’t know what it was (obviously, or she would have remembered it), and the thing scratched and prowled around in the dark hinterland of her memory, exasperatingly out of sight. A beast in the jungle, refusing to come into the light of the campfire. It was something tremendously important and it was gnawing and tugging at her, trying to make itself visible, to bring itself into the light. A great golden lion of a memory waiting to spring into life.

Before she was dead, Mandy had a brilliant memory. You came to Mandy before you went to Google. And if anyone was ever in doubt about what someone had said, who they had said it to, when they had said it, they would come running to her. Jonathan was always saying, “Who’s this chap who’s been on at me? Have I ever met him?” and Mandy would say, “Roger Peacock. At a constituency meeting on the twelfth of April 2017, you promised him there’d be an inquiry into his wife’s case. Andrea Peacock.”

“And has there been?”

“No.”

Read more: Literary Hub