“And eerie that she was reading about sea turtles. Obviously I can’t be the only one thinking about them but I had the shocking feeling that here was another one of me locked up alone in a brain with the same thoughts. Me, what’s that after all? An arbitrary limitation of being bounded by the people before and after and on either side. Where they leave off I begin, and vice versa. I once saw a cartoon sequence of a painter painting a very long landscape. When he’d finished he cut it up into four landscapes of the usual proportions. Mostly one doesn’t meet others from the same picture. When it happens it can be unsettling.”

from Turtle Diary

Picador, London (1977), page 45

Extracted from Mr Hoban’s third novel and dropped on 4 February 2008 in celebration of his eighty-third birthday.