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"Listen, I've given up on Mankind: he has no need of me. But I'll give you some advice. Be a decent man. Don't fight, unless someone is really asking for it. Don't aggravate the rich. Don't try to get your hand up the girls' skirts. Unless they ask you to. Don't be a monk with one mouth and a devil with the other. Don't make bargains with people you don't understand. Don't let that goat make a twat of you. Got it? Good."
Jo Harkin, The Pretender
Tell Me an Ending: A Novel
By Jo Harkin.
Design by Tristan Offit.
Books I Loved in 2026: The Pretender by Jo Harkin
"I won't change," he says, and she laughs. "Have you changed before?" she asks. "Yes," answers John Collan, Lambert, Simnel, Edward.
"What would he do, standing there in front of the sword in the stone? Merlin saying: If you take this sword, you'll have a few months of glory, then six years of servitude. If you follow the Lady of the Lake--that beautiful magpie-looking woman there, with the blue eyes, that despitous tongue--you and she will have a year of bliss, then you'll lose her, and mourn her the rest of your life? He'd do it. Of course he would. Push Merlin out of the way, snatch it up. Bright joy, black grief, He'd take them both together."
Jo Harkin, The Pretender
"Simnel thinks of Joan, the time when they lay under the tree and looked up through the leaves at the blazing blue sky. Except this time Joan turns to him and says: You aren't the same. Well, no, he admits. It's this poisonous wroth in me. But once the people that wronged us are dead, I'll be kind and tender again, and you'll laugh at me for it. She says: Your love isn't the same. He says: My love for you exists outside time. See, it looks exactly as it should, as bright and fresh as an apple. The sky is darkening. Fear comes over him. She doesn't reply."
Jo Harkin, The Pretender
"The problem with Ovid, Joan once said, besides being a shrew, is that he didn't understand women. He thought they gave in to persistence, nauseating love letters, worshipful slavishness. Whereas he himself was only aroused by indifference. "I flee the eager, I chase the coy." But he didn't realize that most women are exactly the same. They can't bear not to be noticed. They seek what is elusive. They want what is wanted by other women. If you play it right, you shouldn't have to lift so much as a foot in their direction. Let alone a fucking pen. By the Virgin! Nobody wants a love poem. Nobody."
Jo Harkin, The Pretender
"Lying not far from the slipper, farther under the bed, but gleaming, wanting to be found, is a silver-and-bone comb. He runs his fingers over the tines, imagining them pressed against her small, catlike skull, tilling the black hair, the blue-white brightness of skin revealed in the parting. He sniffs it; it smells of her, a perfume of clove and roses, and animal oils. He presses its points into his palm, harder and harder, leaving a row of indentations glowing white in red."
Jo Harkin, The Pretender
"There are primroses on the bright grass edging the mud tracks, which have dried and cracked. The pigs trample through the richly fetid midden. Bluebells in the wood; wood pigeons flapping on top of each other; blossom crowded onto tree branches, silk, lavish, deeply pink. Above it all, the sky a flawless blue, intensely perfect, like a lid that could be flipped, to show God looking down, saying: Go forward, my son. This spring you are a man."
Jo Harkin, The Pretender
