Twenty past three is the minute most lives slide over.
Too early for tea. Too late for the morning. Neither hour nor half. A small unguarded place between things.
These thirty-six stories live in that minute.
A widower listens to a Bakelite radio that plays four soft notes by itself. A schoolboy steps through a stopped clock and is offered one minute to choose. A platform appears between Platforms 1 and 3 at a station where no train should arrive. A child waits at a bus stop for a route discontinued years ago.
Quietly uncanny and unexpectedly tender, Twenty Past Three is a book about grief and grace, attention and choice ? about the patient minute in which the world allows us, briefly, to catch up with ourselves.
Read one before bed. Read one when you cannot sleep.
And next time the clock reads 3:20 ? you will know what to do.
