Sophie Hannah
Sophie Hannah is an internationally bestselling writer of psychological crime fiction, published in 27 countries. In 2013, her latest novel, The Carrier, won the Crime Thriller of the Year Award at the Specsavers National Book Awards. Two of Sophie’s crime novels, The Point of Rescue and The Other Half Lives, have been adapted for television and appeared on ITV1 under the series title Case Sensitive in 2011 and 2012. In 2004, Sophie won first prize in the Daphne Du Maurier Festival Short Story Competition for her suspense story The Octopus Nest, which is now published in her first collection of short stories, The Fantastic Book of Everybody’s Secrets.
Sophie has also published five collections of poetry. Her fifth, Pessimism for Beginners, was shortlisted for the 2007 T S Eliot Award. Her poetry is studied at GCSE, A-level and degree level across the UK. From 1997 to 1999 she was Fellow Commoner in Creative Arts at Trinity College, Cambridge, and between 1999 and 2001 she was a fellow of Wolfson College, Oxford. She is forty-one and lives with her husband and children in Cambridge, where she is a Fellow Commoner at Lucy Cavendish College. She is currently working on a new challenge for the little grey cells of Hercule Poirot, Agatha Christie’s famous detective.
“Look at us. One bleeding body, one corpse, and a husk who's been half dead for years. No one who took an objective look at this room could think it was anything but too late, Ruth. For all of us.”
“She was irritated, briefly, by the thought that she might be becoming more mature. Why should she become a better person when no one else did?”
“Too much self-esteem, thought Simon: the real curse of our age.”
“He didn't subscribe to the view...that spirituality was a fast track to happiness. He believed the opposite was true: spiritual people suffered more than most.”
“He wondered how many new starts a person was entitled to, how many times one could say it was the other person's fault and truly believe it.”
“Prejudices are comforting: everyone should make sure to cultivate at least three.”
“Why treat the people closest to you like strangers?”
“We manufacture anger to give ourselves the illusion of power when we feel weak and helpless.”
“Simon would disapprove, in the way that people who lacked life experience always disapproved of others having adventures they had so far missed out on. ”
“You can always, and easily, give somebody the gift of hope and faith, even in the midst of despair.”
“Weak people always attack strong people - it's safer. It's weak people who are dangerous, who lash out uncontrollably and hurt you back. Stong people can walk away - no repercussions, you see, if you attack a stong person.”
“No attack is ever really an attack on the victim. It's the perpetrator attacking an aspect of himself that he loathes. He or she.”
“But we’ll stumble on, she and I, into our messy future. And we’ll have each other”
“What they'd got was a fat, balding academic who bandied about the phrase "family annihilation", especially when there were cameras pointed at him, and mentioned the titles of books and articles he'd written to anyone who would listen; who blatantly thought he was the mutt's nuts, as Sellers had so aptly put it.”
“I never do enjoy my breaks, long or short...I look forward to them intensely, but as soon as they begin, I can feel them starting to end. I feel the temporariness of my freedom, and find it hard to concentrate on anything other than the sensation of it trickling away.”
“Lies were lethal, however honourable the intentions of the liar. They deprived people of the opportunity to know the basic facts of their own lives. ”