‘The atmosphere in the house was thick with my father's depression.’
My father worked for twenty-eight years in the Hoover washing machine factory in Merthyr Tydfil. In South Wales at that time, when most labour was hard, physical, badly paid and often dangerous, people said it was a good job.
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‘She must have loved gold seeing that everything in the penthouse was gold. We didn’t sit. Fear didn’t let us see where to sit.’ A story by Adachioma Ezeano.
‘I had also, a week earlier, been fired for trying to sleep with my boss’s husband. I got the idea from a book, or maybe every book.’ A story by Emily Adrian.
‘The Mitsubishi conglomerate controls a forty per cent share of the world market in bluefin tuna; they are freezing and hoarding huge stocks of the fish every year.’ Katherine Rundell on extinction speculation.
‘Two roof tiles are missing to the rear: the kiss of death. Without repair, ruination is now inevitable. Until then, this is my best hope of shelter.’ Cal Flyn visits the island of Swona in northern Scotland.
‘I’m on the cliff of myself & these aren’t wings, they’re futures. / For as long as I can remember my body was a small town nightmare.’ A poem by Ocean Vuong.
A short story by Jianan Qian on stray dogs, desperation and re-education in rural China during the Cultural Revolution.
‘She’s a good-for-nothing chummer. If she survives a week on the slime line without cutting off her thumb or slicing her wrist, she’s hired.’
‘Where wealth and technology go, culture quickly follows, and soon it became acceptable, even desirable, to express an interest in Japan beyond the mere practicality offered by its products.’
‘What I’d noticed, actually, was that none of the men on the island were missing fingers.’
‘My mother’s cry rang in my ears from infancy. ‘No child of mine is going into a shoe factory.’’
‘I was stuck in Texas for a month. The days passed like slow-motion films.
