…Ruby felt she was always waiting. She waited for light after dark. She waited for protection and love – especially love. She waited for her life to start and the white noise to end. She waited and dreaded the day when she would have to confront the spider. She lived with the anxious feeling that people had to die in order for her to progress up the waiting queue…
Doing Life in Paradise discusses coincidence, synchronicity and the absurdity of life and our dependence on hope in particular. In its clipped, distinctive prose, the novel explores the peculiar places life can take us, while exposing the curious strategies we each employ in order to survive. Through the eyes of its hyper-real characters, the novel searches for meaning, finds surface and routine, and in that, exposes the absurdity of life.
...He thought maybe Flat 5 Lady would call a doctor for him, but she didn’t. He couldn’t blame her, she was mad herself. It was the flats or it was her life that made her mad. Her life was full of secrets and disappointments. Like all lives in Paradise; everyone was trapped in one way or another, in one secret or another, in one disappointment or another, in one adage or another, in the promise of hope…
