No one to greet us at Heathrow. We’d arrived from Bombay, via Prague and Beirut, my two sisters and I. A relative who had come to pick up a cousin travelling with us gave us a lift. We drove past dark, cramped buildings to an address in Wimbledon where two-storeyed houses huddled. Lord, I said, ha…
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‘I think there should be a National Service of Hospitality. The best way to see the true face of humanity is to serve it a plate of chips.’
Camilla Grudova on bad-mannered customers.
‘Anyone who has ever worked night shifts will understand the vertiginous feeling that comes with staring down the day from the wrong end.’
A.K. Blakemore on working nights.
‘I was constantly reading job ads, trying to find my holy grail – a job I could stand to do, and someone foolish enough to hire me.’
Sandra Newman on learning how to play professional blackjack.
‘I loved being a receptionist. What I loved about it was playing the part of being a receptionist.’
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‘Every part of you would swell, including your eyeballs, and no matter how much water you drank, you were always dehydrated.’
Junot Díaz on working for a steel mill.
'Han Suyin, elegant postcolonial diva avant la lettre, icon of the new, nonaligned Asia, thorn in the side of the dying British Empire and the American Right.'
‘It gives me two languages to play with in my writing. It also gives me two languages to love and curse in.’
‘How do you love a monster when they are no longer monstrous?’
New fiction by Diana Evans.
‘I don’t think much of the very silly, even gullible, person that I am.’
Fiction by Fleur Jaeggy, translated by Gini Alhadeff.
‘The people she longed to be understood by, the ones at whom her anxious hope was pinned, were her parents.’
Fiction by Vigdis Hjorth, translated by Charlotte Barslund.
‘In our household there was no distinction of feeling between those who were biologically related and those who were simply instructed to regard each other as such.’
Viktoria Lloyd-Barlow on growing up with foster siblings.
