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A Bizarre Courtship
Ben Okri
‘One morning, more golden than yellow, I went outside to our housefront and saw that the beggars had gone.‘
A Bleed of Blue
Amy Key
‘I was trying simultaneously to numb the grief I felt and to burrow into that grief, so I could stand in it.’
A Boat Ride to the Confluence of the Two Niles
Isma’il Kushkush
‘April 2022 marked my first visit to my ancestral homeland in seven years.’
Memoir by Isma’il Kushkush.
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 Childhood in Broadmoor Hospital
Patrick McGrath
‘These were the friends of my early boyhood, men who twenty years earlier would still have been called ‘criminal lunatics’.‘
A Cock Fight
Charles Nicholl
‘And now, the night before the fight, with the moon high and nearing the full, came the final preparation: we were taking him to Auguste.’
A Dose of Winter Medicine
Kseniya Melnik
‘I looked at the carpet in her small living room. This is where she had fallen and lay for twenty-four hours before her younger sister, Auntie Tanya, had found her.’
A Fish Out of Water
Mario Vargas Llosa
‘A democracy, I said, is driven by the electoral process, and in elections there are victories and defeats.’
A Flat Place
Noreen Masud
‘If all things were equal, what were we even doing here? Why weren’t we lying on our living-room floors, watching the dance of the dust, today and every day?’
Memoir by Noreen Masud.