"I had just come to accept that my life would be ordinary when extraordinary things began to happen. The first of thos…"

"My grandfather was the only member of his family to escape Poland before the Second World War broke out. He was twelv…"

"Like the monsters, the enchanted-islands story was also a truth in disguise. Compared to the horrors of mainland Euro…"

"When I was fifteen, an extraordinary and terrible thing happened, and there was only Before and After."

"All I could think was that grandfathers were supposed to die in beds, in hushed places humming with machines, not in …"

"A falling-down wreck on the edge of town, curtains permanently drawn, that would turn out to have been home to some a…"

"Finally I came upon a pair of rooms missing entire walls, into which a little forest of underbrush and stunted trees …"

"Sometimes you just need to go through a door."

"It was true of course, what my dad had said: I did worship my grandfather. There were things about him that I needed …"

"It was one thing for a grandparent to withhold something […] from a grandchild, quite another for a father to keep it…"