That was the problem with time travel, of course (apart from the impossibility) - one would always be a Cassandra, spreading doom with one's foreknow… - Kate Atkinson

Because that was how it happened: one moment you were there, laughing, talking, breathing, and the next you were gone. Forever. And there wasn’t even a shape left in the world where you’d been, neither the trace of a smile nor the whisper of a word. Just nothing.

Fiction had never been Jackson's thing. Facts seemed challenging enough without making stuff up. What he discovered was that the great novels of the world were about three things - death, money and sex. Occasionally a whale.

"It wasn't fair, he thought peevishly. "Who said life was fair?" his father had said to him a hundred times. He had said the same himself to his own daughter. ("It's not fair, Daddy.") Parents were miserable buggers. It SHOULD be fair. It should be paradise."