
"All the best stories in the world are but one story in reality — the story of escape. It is the only thing which interests us all and at all times, how to escape."
— Arthur Christopher Benson(Source: readfaster.com

"All the best stories in the world are but one story in reality — the story of escape. It is the only thing which interests us all and at all times, how to escape."

"Of course anyone who truly loves books buys more of them than he or she can hope to read in one fleeting lifetime. A good book, resting unopened in its slot on a shelf, full of majestic potentiality, is the most comforting sort of intellectual wallpaper."


"Books are like oxygen to a deep-sea diver,” she had once said. “Take them away and you might as well begin counting the bubbles."
"Don’t let the world convince you that you can’t write. That may ultimately be true, who knows, but it’s way too early to tell. You’re playing the long game, and in the meantime don’t take any guff from those swine. Maybe you don’t look or act or talk like the chosen one. That’s all right. Because in the end writers aren’t chosen. You choose yourself."


Fans of Emily Pollifax (Mrs. Pollifax on the China Station) will welcome back the well-mannered, tea-pouring Garden Club chairman, who is also an adroit and canny agent for the CIA. This time her assignment seems simple: while she and her husband Cyrus Reed are vacationing in Thailand, she is to pick up some valuable information on drug smuggling from an informant called Ruamsak. Everything goes awry immediately: Ruamsak is murdered, Cyrus is kidnapped and Emily joins forces with Bonchoo, an intriguing stranger with complex reasons of his own for wanting to find Cyrus. The usual phalanx of muddled but supportive CIA agents try to follow Emily through the jungles of Thailand and are seriously rattled when one of their directors abruptly vanishes, only to reappear in the Golden Triangle as the head of all illicit drug trafficking. Pollifax needs all her wiles and her considerable skills in the martial arts, not only to track her husband but also to put a serious dent in the heroin trade. She accomplishes everything with vigor and charm.