Shortlisted for the Booker Prize 2023
Study for Obedience
Sarah Bernstein
Shortlisted for the Booker Prize 2023 - One of Granta magazine’s Best of Young British Novelists
A powerful, compressed masterwork for fans of Shirley Jackson and Claire-Louise Bennett
A woman moves from the place of her birth to a remote northern country to be housekeeper to her brother, whose wife has just left him. The youngest child of many siblings - more than she cares to remember - from earliest childhood she has attended to their every desire, smoothed away the slightest discomfort with perfect obedience, with the highest degree of devotion. Soon after she arrives, a series of unfortunate events occurs, and she notices that the local suspicion about incomers in general seems to be directed particularly in her case. What is clear is that she is being accused of wrongdoing, but in a language she cannot understand and so cannot address. And however diligently and silently she toils in service of the community, still she feels their hostility growing, pressing at the edges of her brother’s property...
Latest Releases
2023 in Highlights
Essays & Memoir|The Online Edition
Listlessness
Christy Edwall
‘The listless mind is one which defers rather than tries to bring about closure. There is always one more tab to open.’ Christy Edwall on listlessness in twenty-first century fiction.
Fiction|Issue 162
Biography of X
Catherine Lacey
‘Grief has a warring logic; it always wants something impossible, something worse and something better.’ An extract from Biography of X by Catherine Lacey.
Fiction|The Online Edition
I Won’t Let You Go
Hiromi Kawakami
Translated by Allison Markin Powell
‘I have no idea why I felt so drawn to the mermaid, but the pull was irresistible.’ Fiction by Hiromi Kawakami, translated by Allison Markin Powell.
Essays & Memoir|Issue 161
Speaking Brother
Will Harris
‘I don’t have a brother; I’m an only child. But a few years ago I started writing poems in which a brother appears.’ Will Harris on Brother Poem
In Conversation|The Online Edition
In Conversation
Leslie Jamison & Margo Jefferson
‘The self is the work of art. Criticism puts that self in the service of other art.’ The authors discuss the multiplicity of the self, the idea of necessity, and how to work with what you lack.
Writing by Granta Books Authors
Skromnost
Janet Malcolm
‘The Czech word skromnost means “modesty”, but it also carries a mild sense of forelock-tugging humbleness, of knowing one’s place.’
An excerpt from Janet Malcolm’s final book.
I Am the Word for God and Boy
Aidan Cottrell-Boyce
‘We are sitting in a cafe, on planet Earth, on the night before our wedding day.’
Fiction by Aidan Cottrell-Boyce.
In Conversation
Tom Bullough & Ben Rawlence
‘People may not want realism but it’s still our job to try and supply it in compelling and truthful ways.’
Tom Bullough and Ben Rawlence on writing into the climate crisis.
The Intoxicated Years
Mariana Enríquez
‘They cried as if they weren’t to blame for any of it. We hated innocent people.’
Careless
Hiroko Oyamada
‘As I lay on the mattress, the white toe pads of the gecko floated up before me, against the vastness of the blue-black night. Rather than a presence, it seemed to me more like a trace, a barely discernible odour that flooded in on the air.’
Bestsellers
Granta Editions
News, Prizes & Events
I’m A Fan Wins a British Book Award
I'm A Fan by Sheena Patel wins the Book of the Year: Discover Award at the British Book Awards.
Birnam Wood Shortlisted for the Orwell Prize for Political Fiction
Birnam Wood by Eleanor Catton is a finalist for the Orwell Prize for Political Fiction.
Heritage Aesthetics Wins the RSL Ondaatje Prize
Anthony Anaxagorou has won the RSL Ondaatje Prize for his collection Heritage Aesthetics. The prize is awarded to an outstanding work of fiction, non-fiction or poetry that best evokes the spirit of a place.
