Tokyo Year Zero
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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.’
The Great Migration
Hans Magnus Enzensberger
‘For a long time there was greater anxiety in Europe about the consequences of emigration than of immigration.’ From 1992, Hans Magnus Enzensberger on migration. Translated by Martin Chalmers.
Liberation Day
Christa Wolf
‘The world stubbornly refused to end and we were not prepared to cope with a world that refused to end.’
Buchenwald
Ian Buruma
‘Once upon a time, on top of a green hill, high above the red roofs of Weimar, there was an oak tree.’
Halle by Day
Hans Joachim Ellerbrock
‘Partly as a result of emissions from these plants, but more particularly because brown coal is burnt in private houses, Halle has the highest level of air pollution in Germany.’
The Stone-Thrower from Eisenhuttenstadt
Max Thomas Mehr & Regine Sylvester
‘It has nothing to do with the question of the foreigners. No one in Eisenhuttenstadt wants the foreigners here.’
A Hippy Among Communists
Klaus Schlesinger
‘In March 1975, thirty years after the collapse of German fascism, N., a student from Berlin – bearded and long-haired – attended a series of lectures at a university on the Baltic coast.’
Shaking Hands with the Zeitgeist
Wolf Biermann
‘He was, after all, more than a mere hiccup in the history of the world.’
The Devil’s Kitchen
Russell Hoban
‘I'll now describe this artefact as precisely as I can because I want to make it perfectly clear that when I bought it there was no reason for me to think that it was anything more than what it appeared to be.’
The Table
Pawel Huelle
‘‘Oh, that table!’ my mother would shriek, ‘I just can't stand it a moment longer! Other people have decent furniture.’’
Lederhosen
Haruki Murakami
‘Please, I beg you. If I do not buy lederhosen now, I will never buy lederhosen.’
