Startled In The Dark
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Thailand
Haruki Murakami
‘Everything had gone well for her until her father died of cancer. Everything—without exception.’
A short story by Haruki Murakami, translated by Jay Rubin.
Burying The Emperor
John Ryle
‘Twenty-five years after his death, His Imperial Majesty, King of Kings, Elect of God, Defender of the Faith,was finally being laid to rest, though they still could not be certain how he met his end.’
John Ryle attends the funeral of Haile Sellasie.
The Andes of Martin Chambí
Martin Chambí & Amanda Hopkinson
‘Chambi's mission was to portray the dignity and traditions of his people through their lives and labours, and he was well aware of the significance of his undertaking.’
Lovely Girls, Very Cheap
Decca Aitkenhead
‘A bar girl in Ko Samui is employed to attract customers. Almost every bar has at least one girl, and some of the larger bars have up to twenty’.
This Side of the Oder
Judith Hermann
‘Time retreated, his dread crouched in the farthest recess of his mind.’
I Heard It Through The Grapevine
James Campbell
At the turn of 1962–3, James Baldwin was regarded as a writer with the power...
Tehran Spring
Christopher de Bellaigue
Christophe de Bellaigue on what happened when free speech came to the ayatollahs' Tehran.
Let There Be Light!
David Feuer
‘Probably, the Rabbi would have preferred to find a Hasidic psychiatrist, but unfortunately there was no such thing.’
The Women’s Ashram
Dayanita Singh & Sunil Khilnani
‘Nirmala Chakravarty, a young and beautiful Shakta mystic from East Bengal, known to her followers as Anandamayi, first came to the city of Benares in 1928’.
The Chinese Lesson
A. M. Homes
‘I am thinking about Susan, about what it means to be married to someone I know nothing about.’
Diego Garcia
Simon Winchester
‘How do you persuade a thousand dogs to walk into a fire? How do you persuade them, as it were, to commit suttee?’
The Lazy River
Ryszard Kapuściński
‘One cannot compare the tropical forest with any European forest or with any equatorial jungle.’
Kemp and Potter
Nicholas Shakespeare
‘By coming to Tasmania, I'd repeated the pattern of an ancient, unknown relative and the discovery pleased me in a profound and mysterious way.’
The Lost City
Isabel Hilton
‘There is nobody to blame but the Communist Party. They had absolute control during the fifty years it took to destroy Beijing, and they had the chance to develop a modern, civilized city.’
Our Lives are Only Lent to Us
Penelope Fitzgerald
‘The two cultures are complementary but in the way that death is to life.’
Overreachers
Richard Ford
‘Madeleine Granville was standing at the hotel window of the Queen Elizabeth II, trying to decide which tiny car far below on Mansfield Street was her yellow Saab’.
The Hotel Capital
Olga Tokarczuk
‘At the same time I take off my exotic language, my strange name, my sense of humour, my face lines, my taste for food not appreciated here, my memory of small events—and I stand naked in this pink and white uniform as if emerging from the sea mist.’
Pronek in History
Aleksandar Hemon
‘This happened on a night train to Linz: swarthy-faced robbers startle Adolf and strip his felt jacket halfway down his arms so he cannot move them (their long nails scratching him just above his elbow)’.
Sierra Leone
Teun Voeten
‘Sierra Leone is a small country on the coast of West Africa of roughly the same size and population as Scotland: 28,000 square miles, about five million people’.
But Richard Widmark
Nik Cohn
‘I ask my wife what she means by kidnap exactly, but she says never mind’.
Whale
Panos Karnezis
‘Whale arrived at work a little after seven with black circles round his eyes’.
The Ascent of Man
Joseph O’Neill
‘One June dusk in 1999 I found myself walking across a rice field near Fishing Pond, in east Trinidad, in the company of a game warden and a self-described naturalist-at-large sometimes known as the Turtle Man.’
The Trout Opera
Matt Condon
‘On the veranda of the Buckley's Crossing Hotel, reclining in dimpled leather armchairs, Judges Carrington and Thorpe observed in silence the giant trout shuffling across the bridge’
When I Was Lost
James Hamilton-Paterson
‘Maybe the trick is to find your surroundings so engrossing, so diverting, as to be unaware that anyone is missing you. The chances are nobody is’.
Against Travel Writing
Robyn Davidson
’Shortly after its publication in 1980 I was surprised to learn that I had written a travel book’.
The Emotions are not Skilled Workers
Elliot Perlman
‘He is wrong, though. You didn’t read poetry at all. He had wanted you to read poetry but you didn’t.’
It Don’t Mean a Thing
Paul Auster
‘The single inhabitant of an asteroid that orbits around a tertiary moon of Pluto, visible only through the strongest telescope.’
Obedience
Ian Parker
‘Herbert Winer, who has not tortured anyone for nearly forty years, lives in New Haven, Connecticut, as he did in the early Sixties.’
Ian Parker on authority, ethics and human behaviour.
The Red Coral Bracelet
Judith Hermann
‘My first and only visit to a therapist cost me my red coral bracelet and my lover.’
If I Dream I Have You
Justine Picardie
The savage, it is said, fails to distinguish the visions of sleep from the realities...
Paolo
Tim Parks
‘My last glimpse of Paolo was on the platform at Verona station when I pointed him out to the police.’
Real Time
Amit Chaudhuri
‘He sighed; his wife never satisfied him when he needed her most; and quite probably it was the same story the other way round.’
