Michelle de Kretser, in The Lost Dog:

describing a character:

A glass-fronted cabinet held a harlequin, a corsair, a ballerina, a drummer boy, a Bo Peep with a crook wreathed in flowers and a lilac dress bunched up over a sprigged underskirt. Once a week Audrey murmured of love to small porcelain people while holding them facedown in soapy water.

describing a failed separation:

To the ache of raw solitude he applied his usual balm of work: marking essays, reading, typing words onto a screen late into the night. The dog would leave his basket to settle on a rug in the study, first turning around thrice, an apprentice sorcerer. Later he would go out into the yard. When he returned, his fur carried the mineral scent of earth into the room.

Tom went to the cinema; out to dinner with colleagues. Then, at the end of a blunt winter's day, in the act of transferring a packet of buckwheat noodles from a shelf to a supermarket cart, he froze. Pride, which had seemed insurmountable, lay in ruins: toppled, like that, and the view a sparkling clarity.