title: Selected Essays, Poems, and Other Writings (Penguin Classics)
author:  George Eliot 
description: A. S. Byatt was born in 1936 and educated in York and at Newnham College, Cambridge, of which she is now an Honorary Fellow. She taught English at University College, London, from 1972 to 183. She appears regularly on radio and television, and writes academic articles and literary journalism both in England and abroad. Her fiction includes The Shadow of the Sun; The Game; The Virgin in the Garden; Still Life; Sugar and Other Stories; Possession, winner of the 1990 Booker Prize and the 1990 Irish Times/Aer Lingus International Fiction prize; the novella Angels and Insects; The Matisse Stories; The Djinn in the Nightingale's Eye, a collection of fairy stories; Babel Tower; Elementals: Stories of Fire and Ice; The Biographers Tale; A Whistling Woman and The Little Black Book of Stories. Her work has been translated into 28 languages. Her critical work includes Degrees of Freedom: The Early Novels of Iris Murdoch, Unruly Times (on Wordsworth and Coleridge) and, with the psychoanalyst Ign&#234;s Sodr&#233;, Imagining Characters: Six Conversations About Women Writers. Passions of the Mind, a collection of critical essays, appeared in 1991; a new collection, On Histories and Stories, appeared in 2000; Portraits in Fiction, a study of the relationship between painting and the novel, and (ed.) Selected Essays, Poems and Other Writings, by George Eliot, in 2001. She was appointed DBE in 1999.
zlib_text:   
  
  **VELOCITY**
  
    
  
   **Dean Koontz, © 2005**
  
    
    
    
  
  > > > > > > > > > This book is dedicated to Donna and Steve Dunio, Vito and
  > Lynn Cerra, Ross and Rosemary Cerra.
  
  > > > > > > > > > I’ll never figure out why Gerda said yes to me.
  
  > > > > > > > > > But now your family has a crazy wing.
  
    
    
    
    
    
    
  
    
    
  
  A man can be destroyed but not defeated.
  
  —Ernest Hemingway,
  
  The Old Man and the Sea  
    
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  And now you live dispersed on ribbon roads,
  
  And no man knows or cares who is his neighbour
  
  Unless his neighbour makes too much disturbance,
  
  But all dash to and fro in motorcars,
  
  Familiar with the roads and settled nowhere.
  
  —T.S. Eliot,
  
  Choruses from “The Rock”  
    
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   **PART 1**
  
    
  
   **THE CHOICE IS YOURS**
  
    
    
    
    
    
  
   **Chapter 1**
  
    
  
  With draft beer and a smile, Ned Pearsall raised a toast to his deceased
  neighbor, Henry Friddle, whose death greatly pleased him.
  
  Henry had been killed by a garden gnome. He had fall