The Maulana bends down at the washbasin and draws water to his face.


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The tourists are gone. They’ve fled to Islamabad, along with the landlords and the hoteliers and the battalions of police that used to defend them, and certainty has left with them.
The Maulana bends down at the washbasin and draws water to his face.
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‘The slutty ingenuity of vegetables when it comes to desire and reproductive methods is a marvel.’
Rebecca May Johnson negotiates allotment culture.
‘Globalisation is incomplete: money can go anywhere, but laws cannot.’
Oliver Bullough on one of Britain’s most contested outposts: the British Virgin Islands.
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A new story from Lydia Davis.
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An excerpt from Ukamaka Olisakwe’s Ogadinma.
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From Postcolonial Love Poem by Natalie Diaz.
Fatima Bhutto was born in Kabul in 1982. She is the author of Songs of Blood and Sword (Vintage) and The Shadow of the Crescent Moon (Penguin), now available in paperback. She currently lives in Karachi.
More about the author →‘In a connected world, how can anyone close their doors?’
‘I have gone to the forest to lie among the moss and sleep under a canopy of trees. I have gone to the forest to root among the soil and listen to the birds.’
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‘There wasn’t much money. His father had been blunt: the classes were fine, the rest wasn’t.’
‘It was against the understood traditions of society to prepare Sunday lunch without macaroni pie.’ 2016 Commonwealth Short Story Prize – regional winner for the Caribbean.
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