The following text is an excerpt from the memoir The Chimney Birds by Nuala Feenan. The adult narrator recalls a winter morning in childhood when a starling that had fallen down the chimney is trapped in the front room, and the family must decide how to free it.

The Chimney Birds

We were a house that birds fell into. It was the chimney that did it, a wide cold Victorian throat that swallowed the sky and now and then gave a piece of it back, and so my childhood is punctuated by mornings when we came down to find a starling loose in the front room, mad with the wrongness of walls.

I remember one in particular, the winter I was eight. It had come down in the night and beaten itself half senseless against the window, and by the time we found it the sill was dusted with the fine grey talc of its panic, and the bird itself sat in the corner of the curtain rail, tilted, one wing held wrong, watching us with an eye like a bead of black water.

My father wanted to open the window and let it find its own way. My mother wanted the cat shut in the kitchen and no fuss. I wanted, with the fierce and stupid love of a child, to hold it. To be the one it trusted. I had a picture of it sitting in my cupped hands, calmed, choosing me, and the picture was so bright in me that I climbed on a chair before anyone could stop me and reached up into the curtain.

What I learned, in the half second before it exploded past my face, was that a wild thing does not want your love and has no use for it. The bird went off like a wet firework. It was all around the room at once, a grey panic with a heartbeat, and it hit the glass, and hit it again, and something in me that had wanted to possess it broke open into something better, which was the simple animal wish for it to be all right.

My father opened the window. The cold came in like a held breath let go. And the bird found the gap almost before we saw it move, out over the frosted gardens, a dark stitch pulled quickly through the white morning and lost.

I have thought about that starling for forty years. I think it taught me the first true thing I ever knew about love, which is that the creatures we love most are precisely the ones we cannot keep, that wildness is not a fault in a thing to be corrected but the very part of it we have no right to, and that the kindest hands we own are the ones we learn, against everything in us, to open.

The following are two previously unseen literary passages, from two different literary forms. Write a guided analysis of each passage.

Text 1 is an excerpt from the novel The Coat Room by Priya Ansel. On the night their grandmother comes to live with them, the narrator and their younger brother Theo clear a small coat room and open an old trunk.

The Coat Room

The night our grandmother arrived to live with us, Theo and I were sent to clear the coat room so she could sleep there. We did not call it that because it held coats. We called it that because our father had grown up hanging his hopes in it, or so he said whenever he wanted us to be careful with the door.

The room was the size of a held breath. It smelled of wax jackets and the particular dust that gathers only in houses that keep things. Theo, who was nine and believed that all problems could be solved by moving furniture, began to drag the trunk toward the hall.

"Leave it," I said. "She might want it."

"She won't want a trunk." He said it the way he said everything then, as if the world had already agreed with him and I was the last to be told.

But I had opened the trunk while he was measuring the wall with his arms, and inside were the coats no one wore: a child's duffel with a missing toggle, a raincoat the colour of weak tea, a fur that had gone bald at the collar like an animal that had worried at itself. Under them was a photograph of a woman I did not know standing at a gate I did not know, holding a baby who might have been my father or might have been anyone. On the back, in pencil so faint it seemed to be thinking about disappearing, someone had written a name and then crossed it out.

I did not show Theo. I have thought since that this was the first secret I ever chose, as opposed to the ones that are simply given to a child to carry. I closed the trunk. When our grandmother came up the stairs that evening, slow as weather, she stopped in the doorway of the coat room and looked at it for a long time.

"They put me in here," she said, not to us, and I could not tell whether she was pleased or whether she had, across all those years, expected exactly this. Then she noticed the trunk and something moved across her face, quick and private, the way a fish turns under ice.

"You kept it," she said.

"We keep everything," I told her, which was the truest thing I knew about my family, and also, I would learn, the saddest.

Text 2 is an excerpt from the memoir A House That Answers Back by Ren Okafor. The narrator recalls a childhood in an undemonstrative family who communicated through the sounds and objects of the house rather than words.

A House That Answers Back

Every house my family lived in eventually learned to talk, and I have come to believe this was our doing, not the house's. We were not a demonstrative people. My parents did not say the large words. Instead they built a vocabulary out of the building itself, and taught it to us the way other families teach a mother tongue.

The third stair from the bottom, for instance, meant my father was home before he wanted us to know it. He weighed exactly enough to wake that stair, and when it spoke we would arrange our faces into the version of ourselves he liked to come home to. My mother communicated through the kitchen radio, which she turned up not for the music but so that her sighs would have somewhere to hide. To this day I can date the bad years by the songs she overplayed.

I want to be careful here, because it would be easy to make this sound like deprivation, and it was not. It was translation. Love in my family was not withheld; it was encrypted, and we were all fluent. When my grandmother moved the good plates to the front of the cupboard, that was an apology. When my brother left the landing light on for me, that was I forgive you, though we had not spoken in a week and would not for another.

The house I grew up in had a particular trick. A door on the upstairs corridor would drift open on its own, always at the same slow speed, as if something patient were pushing it. My father blamed the foundations. My mother blamed my father. I decided, at eight, that it was the house trying to join the conversation, and I said good night to it for years, quietly, so no one would hear me being foolish.

I understand now that a house cannot answer. I understand the physics of a settling frame, the draught, the unlevel floor. But I have also stood in the doorway of my own house, in the dark, and heard the third stair go under my own weight, and felt my children upstairs rearrange their breathing. And I have thought: so this is how it passes down. Not the words, which we never had, but the grammar of the silence, the willingness to let a building say the things we were too frightened, or too proud, or too tender, to say out loud.

The following are two previously unseen literary passages, from two different literary forms. Write a guided analysis of each passage.

Text 1 is an excerpt from the novel The Ledger of Names by Rosa Whitcombe. In a library, Ada, a librarian of fifty years, greets a man who has returned decades after his boyhood visits and looks up his old membership record.

The Ledger of Names

The man came in out of the rain the way everyone did, apologising to the door.

Ada did not look up at once. She had learned, over fifty years behind the desk, that a person needs a moment to become a reader again, to shed the street. She let the stamp fall twice on the returns before she raised her eyes.

"You've kept it," he said. He was looking at the long oak counter, at the brass lamp, at the card index that still breathed its faint smell of pencil and dust.

"Things that work do not need replacing," Ada said. "Membership?"

"You won't have me. It was a long time ago."

She turned the ledger toward the light without hurry. Her hands were spotted now, but they moved the way they always had, sure as swallows. "We do not throw the old books out," she said. "Name."

He told her. She turned back through the years, page over page, decade over decade, until the paper grew softer under her thumb, and there it was, a boy's careful signature, the letters too big, the date some forty summers gone.

"You sat at the third table," she said. "You read the atlases and never the novels. You were saving the world for later."

He laughed, and the laugh cracked in the middle, and she understood that later had arrived for him, that he had come back the way people come back, to see whether a small fixed thing had held its place while they had gone soft and grey and far.

"You haven't changed," he said, which was a kindness and a lie.

"I have changed entirely," Ada said. "I have simply done it here, where you could not watch. That is the trick of it. You go away and come back and are amazed, and I stayed and was amazed more slowly."

She stamped a new card and slid it across the oak. The old boy's name, the old careful hand, and beneath it the same name in the tremor of a man who had spent his allotment of years elsewhere.

"Third table is free," she said. "It usually is, this hour."

He went and sat, and the rain went on against the high windows, and Ada returned to her stamping, two beats, a pause, two beats, the metronome of a life kept in one room while outside the whole century had turned over in its sleep.

She did not think it sad. She thought it was simply the shape a life could take, if you were willing to be the thing that stayed.

Text 2 is an excerpt from the memoir A Later Hand by Iris Ballantyne. On the morning of a birthday, the narrator reflects on a lifelong habit of writing a letter to the self each year, then reading and burning the one from the year before.

A Later Hand

For forty years I have written myself a letter on the morning of my birthday, and read the one from the year before, and then burned it in the sink. I do not keep them. That is the whole point of them. A diary hoards; my letters are built to be lost, the way a year is built to be lost, so that the only place they survive is in whatever they did to me on the way out.

When I was young the letters were loud. They made promises the way a puppy makes promises, with the whole body, meaning every word and forgetting it by lunch. I was going to be enormous. I was going to be kind and also famous, which I did not then know were two different careers.

Somewhere in my forties the letters went quiet. They stopped predicting and started noticing. I would read the previous year and find not a stranger, exactly, but a younger relative, someone with my nose and less sense, and I would feel toward that person the particular tenderness you feel for anyone who does not yet know what is coming and would not believe you if you told them.

Now my handwriting has changed. It leans. It has the tremor of a bridge that has decided to admit, at last, that it carries weight. I read last year's letter this morning and the man who wrote it seemed, for the first time, roughly my own age. That was the surprise of this birthday: not that I had grown old, but that I had finally caught up with myself, that the gap between the one who writes and the one who is written about had closed to nothing, the way a shadow shortens under a climbing sun until, at noon, you are standing on it.

I burned the letter. The ash curled and lifted and I watched a year go grey and rise off the porcelain, and the old superstition came up in me, the fear that I was destroying evidence. But there is no evidence. There is only the residue, the way the sea leaves salt. I am the salt of every year I have burned. I do not need the letters. I am the letters, folded now into a body that leans, that carries weight, that writes a little slower and means it more.

Then I made the tea and began, in the changed hand, the next one. Dear you. Well. Here we still are.

The following text is an excerpt from the memoir What the Photograph Won't Say by Adaeze Okonkwo. The narrator studies the single surviving photograph of her grandmother as a young woman, who stands squinting outside an unknown building with one hand raised against the sun.

What the Photograph Won't Say (excerpt)

There is one photograph of my grandmother as a young woman, and I have looked at it so often that I have almost worn the person out of it. She is standing outside a building I cannot identify, in a dress whose colour I will never know, squinting slightly, one hand raised to her brow against a sun that set for good sixty years ago. She is not smiling. This used to trouble me, until my mother explained that you did not smile for a photograph then; a photograph was an expense and an occasion, and you met it the way you met a doctor or a priest, with your face arranged into its most permanent version.

So the photograph tells me almost nothing, and I have spent years mistaking that nothing for depth. I have read patience into the set of her mouth, and defiance, and a kind of tiredness I wanted her to have felt so that I could feel it with her. But the truth is that I am looking at a quarter of a second in 1961, and the woman in it did not yet know she would become anyone's grandmother, did not know me, could not have picked my face out of a crowd of the unborn.

What I love, I have come to think, is not the photograph but the squint: that one involuntary thing, the sun getting into her eyes, the body doing what bodies do regardless of occasion. Everything else in the image is composed. The squint is the only part of her that is not posing, and so it is the only part I can trust, the single honest accident in a made thing, the place where the real woman leaks through the portrait she was asked to be.

The following are two previously unseen literary passages, from two different literary forms. Write a guided analysis of each passage.

Text 1 is an excerpt from the novel The Signalman's Daughter by Doran Whitfield. Mira waits at the unlit end of a station platform at night for Tomas, who arrives carrying the yellow umbrella he has been meaning to return to her.

The Signalman's Daughter

The train would not come for another forty minutes, and Mira had already decided three separate times that she would not wait for it. Each decision lasted about as long as the steam from her breath, which the cold unwound and carried off toward the hills. She stood at the far end of the platform, past the lamp, in the part of the dark the station master never bothered to light, because that was where she and Tomas had always stood, in the years when standing close was the whole of the plan.

He was late. He was always late, and she had once found this charming, the way you find a stray dog charming until it is your own and it has eaten your shoe. Now his lateness felt like a sentence being spoken very slowly, a verdict she already knew and had to hear pronounced anyway.

She had rehearsed what she would say. She had rehearsed it on the bus and in the queue at the ticket window and again while the pigeons resettled in the rafters like an audience getting comfortable. The words were good words. They were fair. They did not blame him for the flat that was too small or the job that had gone or the way a marriage can thin without anyone deciding to thin it, the way a coat wears through at the elbow first because that is where you lean.

Then she saw him at the top of the stairs, and every fair word left her the way birds leave a wire, all at once, for no reason she could name.

He came down slowly. He was carrying, she saw, the yellow umbrella, though it had not rained in a week, and she understood that he had brought it because it was hers, because he had been meaning to return it, and because returning a thing is a way of saying you have thought about the person it belongs to. He held it out before he reached her, as if it were a small flag of a country that no longer existed.

"You kept it," she said.

"I keep things," he said, and the plainness of it undid her more than any argument could have. They stood in the unlit end of the platform, not touching, the umbrella between them like a third person who knew them both too well to leave.

Somewhere down the line a signal changed. The rail began its thin electric hum, the sound of something arriving that could not be argued with.

Text 2 is an excerpt from the memoir A Grammar of Leaving by Salome Ferrant. The narrator recalls being seventeen and loving Piet, a boy who worked the ferries, whom she watched coiling rope at the harbour.

A Grammar of Leaving

I was seventeen the summer I loved Piet, and I want to be honest about the word loved, because at seventeen it is less a feeling than a country you emigrate to overnight, carrying nothing, sure they will speak your language when you arrive.

He worked the ferries. That is almost all I knew of him and almost all I needed. He had a way of coiling rope that I found unreasonably moving, as if the rope were being persuaded rather than forced, and I used to invent errands that took me down to the harbour so that I could watch a boy make loops out of a thing that wanted to be straight.

We spoke, in total, perhaps four times. I have spent more of my life remembering those four conversations than I spent having them, which tells you something about the economy of first love, how little principal it needs to pay out such enormous interest for such a long time.

What I remember is not what he said. I remember the weather of standing near him. I remember deciding, with the terrible seriousness of the young, that my whole life would be arranged around the harbour, and then September came, as Septembers do, indifferent to the arrangements of seventeen year olds, and I went inland to a college in a city that had no water in it that you would want to stand beside.

I did not have my heart broken. That is the part I understand only now. Nothing was broken because nothing had been built; I had loved the way you love a lit window from the street, wholly and from the outside, with no wish to be let in and spoil it. Piet never knew. That was not a tragedy. That was the form the thing required.

Years later someone showed me a photograph of the harbour and there, at the edge, blurred, was a man who might have been him, older, coiling rope still, or perhaps only a stranger doing what men do at harbours. I did not ask. I have kept some things unopened on purpose, the way you keep one letter unread so that a person is never entirely finished saying things to you.

Longing, I have decided, is not a failure of love. It is a grammar. It is the tense we use for what we chose not to have, conjugating a life in the mood of the possible, which is the only mood in which some loves are allowed to go on forever.