EXCERPT | By Sherry Isaac  »  The wheels of the buckboard drew close, the snap of the leather harness, the snort and stamp of Sinclair’s chestnut mare in his ear. Alistair slid back into the present without looking up. “You’re ready, then?”

Sinclair spat a mouthful of sodden tobacco in answer. It landed near the toe of Alistair’s boot. Alistair cringed. For a man with a home and a hearth, Sinclair was sinfully dirty. He could barely accept the man’s handshake when they struck their deal for Alistair’s passage. It was far from comfortable but was an improvement over walking. And it was free, other than a bit of his labour, which was all Alistair could afford.

In each town he helped Sinclair unload whatever he hauled and reload whatever came next. Mostly it was seed, sometimes textiles. When Sinclair picked him up in Bytown—Ottawa, as they’d begun to call it last year—it was panes of glass and ink for a printer’s press. There were more stops than he’d have cared for, but when Sinclair went in search of ale and a bit of company Alistair claimed his circle in the dirt in front of the post office, the general store or the tavern, from where he made his living.

EXCERPT  |  By Perparim Kapllani  »  I dare not look at that left hand. I dare not. But my eyes are drawn to it, as it lies on my right shoulder. He sees my glance and his face softens.

“That is why you went away, isn’t it,” he says gruffly. “You confounded fool, King of Fools, I knew that was why you went away. Tell me I’m right. Tell me, Agron, King of Nincompoops, did you run away like a yellow-bellied missish girl because of this?”

With that he holds up his mangled left hand in my face. My eyes fixed on his hand and saw clearly what I had imagined so many times in my mind, the strong hand, with the two fingers, the ring finger and the middle finger missing, the flesh mottled and badly set over the gap.

I cannot speak. I did not have to. He saw the pain, the torture, the living dread in my eyes that I did not bother to conceal.

EXCERPTS | By Michael Robert Dyet » PART 1, CHAPTER 1: The Thin Line  » The screen door opened and Jayce came in as Katherine shut off her cell.

“Who were you talking to?”

“The Star. They left me a message at home. I’ve got an assignment for Wednesday night. There's a Press Conference for that Drug-Free Rave series we saw on the news."

"And you accepted it?"

"Is there a reason I shouldn’t?”

"Well, yeah. Grace and Bryan. Did you not stop to think how they might feel?”

By Reva Leah Stern |  An excerpt » CHAPTER ONE »  I am contemplating the perfect suicide.

High Jumping... I live in a hermetically sealed high-rise condominium…on the second floor. If I could somehow squeeze through the window’s five-inch opening, I’d most certainly land on the grassy knoll below where I would become, at best, a paraplegic.

A Sleeping Pill Cocktail... I hate drugs that do anything other than annihilate putrid infections, so I’ve never accumulated a home pharmacy… but I do have a half bottle of stale-dated Advil and a litre of Metamucil, which if combined could succeed in turning me into a runny vegetable stew.

By Ben Antao  »  James Kennedy slid out from the pew and made the sign of the Cross, casting a glance towards the brocaded tabernacle where, after the distribution of Communion, the associate pastor had stored the gold-plated bowls of hosts. He paused in the centre aisle, waiting until Alice and Sean joined him. They stepped out leisurely, their eight-year-old son safely between them, as the echoing of the organ began to recede. At the entrance to a spacious foyer, they dipped their fingers in the holy water stoup and crossed themselves one final time.

“Would you like to stay for coffee, James?” asked Alice.

By Ben Antao  »  Eighteen-year-old Eliza Rodricks abruptly halted the Pfaff sewing machine. She scowled at the crooked inseam and cut the thread, tossing the partially completed blue cotton trousers aside.

“Damn,” she muttered, “why can’t I concentrate?” But she knew why. Her mind and heart were preoccupied with Diogo Baltazar. It was much more than a simple schoolgirl crush. It was an infatuation so overpowering in its magnitude that the memory of his touch seemed to be imprinted on the pages of her heart with indelible ink.

“How will I ever make it through another five months in Margao,” she whispered, careful to keep her thoughts from Senhora Lopes, her instructor, and realizing at the same time that her sojourn in her parents’ home country of Goa was crucial to her learning the craft of  tailoring.

Eliza knew that Goan tailors prospered wherever they worked, although in the larger Goan community their social status was low for they were victims of caste discrimination. No matter where they settled, their caste followed them, and Eliza’s parents had always been treated as inferior beings in Nairobi, even though they were successful tailors. So they worked hard to secure a better future for their daughter, often praying that God would show Eliza how to overcome the stigma of caste and be truly happy. Two months prior to her departure for Goa, Eliza had met Diogo. He was of Brahmin birth and out of reach for someone of Eliza’s position as a tailor’s daughter; but on this rare occasion, fate and irony seemed to conspire to bring them together.

By Ben Antao

This excerpt is from Blood & Nemesis, a novel published in 2005 about Goa's freedom struggle from Portuguese rule.

“Put something on and lie next to him,” advised her mother, a petite woman of forty-two, with a dark handsome face smooth as custard, without a trace of a wrinkle. “He may want you again.”

Kamala smiled coyly.

The strident chimes of prayer chants tattooed from the distant temple bells, resonated in the night air with ritual insistence, and nudged Kamala from her repose. What had once sounded to her like a sharp and persistent call to prayer now, with ceaseless repetition, mellowed to become plaintive and wistful, like one’s favorite recording playing in the background to the syncopated percussion of lovemaking. She supposed it must be after midnight for it was only then that the bhajans began in the temple; being curious though, she touched Jovino’s wrist and saw in the luminous dial that it was 2:25.

Jovino stirred at her touch and turned around, facing the ceiling, his eyes closed.

At once, Kamala felt a glow of spiritual reverence kindling in her veins; a notion flashed through her mind that she was lying next to a re-born god, and her body quivered with desire to worship at his lingam. Her wish was soon to be granted for his penis began to grow at her touch. And when it did, she mounted him, feeling his fluid entry inside her.

My lord, my lord, she breathed to herself, swaying gently over him. She kept him in, unable to let go of the tight suction until he rose and grappled her upper body in his arms. She closed her legs around him and ground and rocked and undulated to her yoni’s content; her lips tasted his sweaty neck until she grew delirious with sharp sensations of rapture. For what seemed to her like eternity, she lay there with him in that actively engaged pose she’d once seen in the picture book of Kamasutra.

• Ben Antao, 73, is a journalist and novelist. He has published four novels and several short stories. He can be reahed at This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it  

By Farzana Doctor  | An extract  »  Shaffiq scratches the stubble on his chin and pushes his cleaning cart sluggishly down the long hallway. It is just seven p.m., only the beginning of his shift. He rounds a corner, and then stops for a moment to retrieve a Walkman from his bag. He slips the earphones over his head and allows the Greatest Hits of Bollywood II to saturate the silence around him.

He listens for his favourite song, number two on Side A: Dum Maro Dum. Ah, here it is. He closes his eyes, imagining the black-haired, fairskinned songstress trilling out her high-pitched longing. He sways to the tune, taking his cleaning cart as his dance partner. He opens his eyes and once again sees the bland institutional walls around him. He sighs.

He hates working the night shift. He is bitter that he is working in darkness and sleeping through the afternoon sun. He misses the world’s regular rhythms. Right now, he should be sitting at home with his family, eating his daal and rice, watching Who Wants To Be a Millionaire? Somewhere deep in his heart he believes that this must be a sacrilege of some kind, a crime against nature, even.

By Jenny Panda  |  An excerpt » She had the power to carve sunbeams and raindrops into enchanting crystal shapes that she would hang from the trees and at the ends of rainbows. After some time, a few of the trees began to dislike being covered with things. One day they began to turn brown and orange. They shook their twigs wildly to dislodge the baubles.

By Jenny Panda  |  An excerpt » Once someone's visiting uncle told the villagers that the thing to do to keep a dragon happy was to feed him a maiden. In the village was a farmer who had twenty-two daughters. He really wanted a son to help him plough his fields, but his wife kept having girls. The idea of feeding a daughter occasionally to the dragon did not worry him. So he volunteered to be the source of the maidens.