Excerpt from Smoke by Dan Vyleta, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

I turn the boys away, in any case, ring the bell for lights-out. And in the morning the coaches arrive, all eleven of them, to carry fifty-eight upper-school boys to the train station. It's snowed again and the horses are steaming, and don't one of them shit just as old Swinburne goes walking past. Lovely smell that, fresh horse dung on snow. You want to bottle it and sell it to yer sweetheart.

I watch them go, wrapped in my old blanket. One of the boys looks back at me all the way to the end of the driveway. He don't wave.

Neither do I.

When they're gone, I go inside, shovel some coals into the stove, put on a bone for soup. By the time it's cooked they'll be pulling in at Oxford.

Excerpted from Smoke by Dan Vyleta. Copyright © 2016 by Dan Vyleta. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.