Operation Gomorrah
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World War One Veterans
Steve Pyke
Steve Pyke’s portraits of World War One veterans for Granta 45: Gazza Agonistes.
The Last Place on Earth
Tracy Kidder
‘The living-room windows begin to reflect the lights on the plastic Christmas tree, and the view through those windows is fading, the woods growing thicker, the birches glowing in the dusk.’
Grandma Moore’s Cancer
Mary Karr
‘Those are only rumours of suffering. Real suffering has a face and a smell. And it knows your name.’
The Bank Manager
Charles Glass
‘In the south of France, at the edge of a cove that cannot be reached by road, lives an old woman from England.’
Little America
T. Coraghessan Boyle
‘All he wanted was a quarter, fifty cents, a dollar maybe. The guy was a soft touch, absolutely–the softest.’
L,U,C,I,E
Nadine Gordimer
‘I correct the spelling because I’m a lawyer and I’m accustomed to precision in language; in legal documents the displacement of a comma can change the intention expressed in a sentence and lead to new litigation.’
Pictures from the War
Thomas Kern
‘Kern’s achievement is to have captured this despair, and the confusion of ordinary people forced to live and love and die in the middle of a battlefield.’
Dancing in Cambodia
Amitav Ghosh
‘The only person I ever met who knew both Princess Soumphady and King Sisowath was a dancer named Chea Samy. She was said to be one of the Cambodia’s greatest dancers, a national treasure. She was also Pol Pot’s sister-in-law.’
Chatwin Revisited
Paul Theroux
‘He was such a darter he seldom stayed still long enough for anyone to sum him up.’
The Road to Ouidah
Bruce Chatwin
‘Sweat, fruit, dust. The stunted goats. On the beach the straight line of white breakers, a pale blue sea, the colour almost of the sky. The bleached hulls of the pirogues. The blown coconut palms.’
The Red Notebook
Paul Auster
‘In 1973 I was offered a job as caretaker of a farmhouse in the south of France.’
Memoir by Paul Auster.
The Brass Bar
Louis de Bernières
‘In the late seventies I was desperately attempting to avoid having a career by doing what I supposed were 'real' jobs.‘
Failing to Fall
A.L. Kennedy
‘This is the one thing I know from the minute I lift the receiver and slip that voice inside my ear: it will happen.‘
Reference Points
Philip Kerr
‘It was eating oysters, four hundred of the bivalve sons-of-bitches, that finally killed my father, in a theatre-bar off St Martin's Lane.‘
Eight Arms to Hold You
Hanif Kureishi
‘One day at school–an all-boys comprehensive on the border between London and Kent–our music teacher told us that John Lennon and Paul McCartney didn't actually write those famous Beatles songs we loved so much.'
Neighbours
Adam Mars-Jones
‘Terry and I entertained hundreds of couples over the years, and I don't think we were unusual.‘
The Many Colours of Blood
Candia McWilliam
‘We lived much of our life in the houses of others, and in our own house there lived with us most of the time people other than ourselves.‘
A Bosnian Alphabet
Lawrence Norfolk
‘APOLOGY: A should be for Alphabet: the device I am resorting to in some desperation to structure my thoughts on this subject: my relations vis-à-vis two Yugoslavian wars.‘
A Bizarre Courtship
Ben Okri
‘One morning, more golden than yellow, I went outside to our housefront and saw that the beggars had gone.‘
West
Caryl Phillips
‘Curling herself into a tight fist against the cold, Martha huddled in the doorway and wondered if tonight she might see snow.‘
Wavery’s Last Post
Nicholas Shakespeare
‘At five in the afternoon, the Bahia de Abyla sailed out of Algeciras.‘
Heavy Weather
Helen Simpson
‘The baby was now three months old, and she had not had more than half an hour alone since his birth in February.’
The Poetics of Sex
Jeanette Winterson
‘My lover Picasso is going through her Blue Period. In the past her periods have always been red.’
German Efficiency
Heinrich Böll
‘I hate the man who stood back to back with me for the hour-long journey from Düsseldorf to Cologne.’
