Arithmetic Town
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Head Above Water
Buchi Emecheta
‘Inside, I knew it was more complicated: I knew I was both – a “bush” girl and a civilized Christian.’
Rose on the broken
Maggie Gee
‘They're only wild flowers. I wish I could buy you real roses. But to her they became the real roses, frail petals, each centre a sun. And they smelled of sun and beginnings, as clear and thin as the water.’
Obsessions
Alan Judd
‘She responded to him with a mixture of haughty refusal and a suggestive acknowledgement, a grudging yielding which was what the play demanded.’
The Writing of ‘Or Shall We Die?’
Ian McEwan
‘There was too the challenge, as I saw it, of writing a singable English, simple and clear, that could express public themes without pomposity and private feelings without bathos.’
The Fortune-Teller
Shiva Naipaul
‘While she may have given up counting those broken vows, she had not given up making them.’
Ol’ Black Rock
Philip Norman
‘But here, on a three-legged stool in Tennessee, the tape recorder faltered, as if at the behest of draughts, as if called on to register psychic disturbance.’
The Miraculous Cairn
Christopher Priest
‘The island of Seevl lies like a dark shadow over my memories of childhood.’
The Golden Bough
Salman Rushdie
‘The same face. At every interview the same bland features. It could not be – but it was.’
The Five Of Us
Lisa St Aubin de Terán
‘The freezing of the money signalled the beginning of virtual penury. It also signalled the beginning of our fame.’
Antics
Clive Sinclair
'My nubile companion, assuredly no intellectual, continued to masturbate in front of me.'
About the Eel
Graham Swift
‘We have not yet come to the most remarkable episode in this quasi-mythological quest for the genesis of the eel.’
My Wife is a White Russian
Rose Tremain
‘I'm in nickel and pig-iron and gold and diamonds. I like the sound of all these words. They have an edge, I think. The glitter of saying them sometimes gives me an erection.’
Scandal
A. N. Wilson
‘His father had visited a prostitute and had been a spy. It was quite obvious to Julian that this was true. He was almost pleased to read it, for it justified his sense, never admitted to himself before, that Daddy Spoilt Everything.’
Interviews of the Boys from the War
Daniel Kon
‘But you had to be on the islands to know what it was really all about.’
The Joys of Journalists and Dictators
Andrew Graham-Yooll
‘The crowd then cheers the military. This, too, is a curious display. A few days earlier it had wished every uniformed man a cancer in his mother's liver.’
Mrs Thatcher’s Religious Pilgrimage
Jeremy Seabrook & Trevor Blackwell
‘Mrs Thatcher's success is not only in her ability to plunder the chapel culture in which she was born - that fertile source of imagery and suasion - for she is also a story-teller to the nation, offering us easy and instant illustrations like those of the brightly coloured pop-up picture books of our childhood.’
The Holocaust Reinterpreted: An Indictment of Israel
Boaz Evron
‘The Christian world does have a very bad conscience about the Jews, both because of past centuries and because it did indeed remain indifferent during the Nazi extermination...’
The Wall
Jurek Becker
‘That afternoon a different soldier is standing at the gate. He calls out something that sounds dangerous.’
Memoirs of an Anti-Semite
Gregor von Rezzori
‘For our kind it was impossible to fall in love with a Jewish girl. It meant being unfaithful to our flag.’
The Transcripts of Eichmann Interrogated
Jochen von Lang & Claus Sybill
‘In the early period the Jewish problem wasn't the main thing. What interested us in Austria was work and bread, freedom and an end to servitude.’
The Aesthetics of Resistance
Peter Weiss
‘His whole life, he had declared while still at work on this painting, was nothing less than a continual struggle against the backwardness of thought and the killing of art.’
The Story of a Variation
Milan Kundera
‘I have often heard it said that the novel has already exhausted all its possibilities. I have the opposite impression: that in four hundred years of existence the novel has missed many of its opportunities: it has left many great opportunities unexploited, many roads forgotten, many calls unheard.’
How to Read the Comics
Ariel Dorfman
‘Unlike the other comic strips in the magazine, ‘The Adventures of Mampato’ was conceived, illustrated, and entirely produced in Chile.’
An Unfathomable Ship
Uwe Johnson
‘It is the name of an American ammunition ship which went aground in the summer of 1944; as a result the ship sank, since which time only the tips of its derricks and masts and a corner of the bridge are visible.’
City of the Dead, City of the Living
Nadine Gordimer
‘While I'm ironing, he cleans the gun. I saw he needed another rag and I gave it to him.‘
South of Nowhere
Antonio Lobo Antunes
‘If you and I were anteaters, instead of a man and a woman talking to each other in this corner of the bar, perhaps I would then be able to accustom myself to your silence.’
The Modern Common Wind
Don Bloch
‘Leprosy. It is such an infectious disease it cannot stop with death. Did it stop with the death of Asha Makokha? Tell me, if you think I am wrong.’
Mnemosyne, Teen Taals, and Tottenham Court Road
Russell Hoban
‘Music is a puissant recaller of time past; music is memory's sister and for its very life relies on memory to hold in our minds the passage of sounds through time.’
Elias Canetti
Susan Sontag
ʻCanetti is the story of a liberation: a mind – a language – a tongue set free to roam the world.’
Mungo Among the Moors
T. Coraghessan Boyle
‘At an age when most young Scotsmen were lifting skirts, ploughing furrows and spreading seed, Mungo Park was displaying his bare buttocks to al-haff Ali Ibn Fatoudi, Emir of Ludamar.’
Keepers Of The House
Lisa St Aubin de Terán
‘Lydia Sinclair was just seventeen when she arrived on her husband's estate in the Andes.’ Lisa St Aubin de Terán's fictional memoir.
The Anatomy Of Desire
John L’Heureux
‘He kissed her and caressed her and felt young and whole again. He did not miss his wife and children. He did not miss his skin.’
The Salt Wife
Ted Mooney
'Martha worked in a radio-biology lab in Manhattan, and when Larry, her husband of seven years, left her at last for the cause of art, she decided to accept a long-standing invitation from a lab in Los Angeles to visit their operation and talk about her work.'
