The Marble Collector
Cecelia Ahern
Language: English
Pages: 304
ISBN: 0007501811
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
A forgotten childhood. A discovered life.
What if you only had one day to find out who you really were?
When Sabrina Boggs stumbles upon a mysterious collection of her father’s possessions, she discovers a truth where she never knew there was a lie. The familiar man she grew up with is suddenly a stranger to her.
An unexpected break in her monotonous daily routine leaves her just one day to unlock the secrets of the man she thought she knew. A day that unearths memories, stories and people she never knew existed. A day that changes her and those around her forever.
The Marble Collector is a thought-provoking novel about how the most ordinary decisions we make can have the most extraordinary consequences for how we live our lives. And how sometimes it’s only by shining on a light on someone else, that you can truly understand yourself.
Dangerous Work: Diary of an Arctic Adventure
Off again, forcing Mattie to bang on the wall for us to shut up. Angus loves being an altar boy, he gets paid for it, more for funerals, and when he’s in class the priest passes by his window and gives him the thumbs up or down to let him know what he’s needed for that weekend. If it’s a thumbs up it’s a funeral, and he’ll get more money, if it’s a wedding, he gets less. No one wants to be an altar boy at a wedding. Duncan is at Mattie’s butcher shop, plucking feathers off chickens and turkeys.
A Czechoslovakian bullet-mould marble, it has a frosty finish to it. George tells me something about an acid bath. I ask him if I can buy it and he says no, but he gives it to me instead. I’ve told him about why I’m here and who I think I’m going to see and he feels sorry for me, says he had to view a body once that had been chopped up into bits and I wonder if it was an official identification at all, or something to do with his lifestyle. I even wonder if he was the one who had to chop it up.
He looks at me with absolute contempt. The last time I saw this look on his face, it was followed with a head butt. ‘Sure,’ he says simply. Then he looks me up and down like he has no idea who I am, as though it’s not his own brother standing in front of him, in a puddle of piss. ‘Good luck, Fergus.’ Then he walks out of the toilet leaving me feeling like absolute shit. His speech is boring. It is the most mind-numbingly boring speech in history. No jokes, just all formality. He didn’t reach.
He was to be here. ‘Where’s Charlie?’ Spud says. ‘On holiday with his missus,’ Gerry explains to me, like I know who Charlie is, but I should, he too is in the photograph, a member of the Electric Slags. ‘Peter passed away last year,’ the Marble Cat says. ‘Liver cancer,’ Gerry says. ‘Shut up, you – it was the bowel,’ Spud corrects him, elbowing him in the ribs, which makes Gerry spill his drink and they go at it again. ‘Lads, lads,’ the Marble Cat tries to calm them. ‘I preferred it when.
She has left me to my own devices now that my mission is complete. Lea collapses into the seat beside me, exhausted. For all her free love and serenity earlier, she now looks green in the face. She insists on coming to the home with me. She has an early shift, she’ll sleep it off in the staff room. Besides, I know she cares enough about my dad to want to be with him first thing in the morning. I don’t intend on staying long. I just want to leave the marble by Dad’s bed so that he sees it when he.