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Class of ’81/Come in, Mr Lowry, Your Number Is Up! (Storycuts)

Class of ’81/Come in, Mr Lowry, Your Number Is Up! (Storycuts)

Summary

In 'Class of '81', when the graduates of wizardry school meet for their twenty-year reunion at Bella Pasta, the talk is all about love charms, cantrips, who has put on weight and who has had a body job. But one member of the group has sold out to a husband, home and children, thinking, 'Who needs magic when you can have security?' And yet - what really happens when the magic runs out?

In 'Come in, Mr Lowry, your number is up!', numbers rule our lives, or so believes the insurance assessor in this tongue-in-cheek story. And that if you take into account all the statistics and calculate all the odds, chance will never play a part in what happens to you. But then fate, of all things, intervenes...

Part of the Storycuts series, these two short stories were previously published in the collection Jigs & Reels.

About the author

Joanne Harris

Joanne Harris is the internationally renowned and award-winning author of over twenty novels. Her Whitbread-shortlisted novel Chocolat was adapted to the screen, starring Juliette Binoche and Johnny Depp. She is the author of several other bestsellers, including The Lollipop Shoes, Peaches for Monsieur Le Curé and The Strawberry Thief. She has also written acclaimed novels in such diverse genres as fantasy based on Norse myth (Runemarks, Runelight, The Gospel of Loki), and the Malbry cycle of dark psychological thrillers (Gentlemen & Players, Blueeyedboy, and Different Class).

Born in Barnsley, of an English father and a French mother, she spent fifteen years as a teacher before (somewhat reluctantly) becoming a full-time writer. In 2013, she was awarded an MBE, and in 2022 an OBE. She lives in Yorkshire, plays bass and flute in a band first formed when she was sixteen, and works in a shed in her garden. She is an honorary Fellow of St Catharine's College, Cambridge, and served for four years as Chair of the Society of Authors. She also has a form of synaesthesia which enables her to smell colours. Red, she says, smells of chocolate.
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