Tracy Barker

“And women hate widows all the more because they are just a rumbling scaffold at the shipyard or a storm on the channel or a bullet from a hedgerow away from being one themselves.”
― A.K. Blakemore, The Manningtree Witches

“Really ‘freedom’ means ‘money’, and if anyone tells you otherwise it’s a good bet they’ve plenty of both already.”
― A.K. Blakemore, The Manningtree Witches

“More than anything in the world I would have him see me, and know me. But if he saw me and knew me truly, he would despise me, despise what it is I hold inside me. I wonder if this is what all women eventually come to know - a choice each comes to make between obscuring her true self in exchange for the false regard of a good man, or allowing herself the freedom to be as she truly is and settling for a brute who couldn't care less if she is as broken, as coarse, as hopeless as he.”
― A.K. Blakemore, The Manningtree Witches

“And that is it, poverty. A life slowly narrowing around you like the trick walls of a tomb. You have things and then the things fall to pieces, and then it begins to empty your body out as well, and your mind. No dreams, just hunger. A hole whose edges begin to fray, become undone.”
― A.K. Blakemore, The Manningtree Witches