Granta | The Home of New Writing

Explore Fiction

Amateur Dramatics

Jonathan Lee

‘I heard the news from a nurse with a piece of tinsel tied around her waist: my father had become a hypochondriac.’

Crow Fair

Thomas McGuane

‘You’re in a different world when your own mother doesn’t recognize you, or thinks you’re the stranger who gave her a hickey.’

Late in Life

A.L. Kennedy

‘Eating figs is different for girls.’

From Dream to Dream

Yiyun Li

‘At what point had one’s life stopped belonging to one?’

Success

Adriana Lisboa

‘They hadn’t tried them yet but the girls both knew, from the adverts, that Hollywood cigarettes were awesome.’

Tombouctou

Jamal Mahjoub

‘After about three days in Djenné the lizards begin to talk.’

The Captain

Rattawut Lapcharoensap

‘I was with Dora. We were in love. Things were cheap and plentiful and the money from the insurance was going to last us forever.’

Things with faces

Zoë Meager

‘This is all you remember. The sound of her pacing the house at night.’

The Sarong-Man in the Old House, and an Incubus for a Rainy Night

Michael Mendis

‘I say his fingers are dying because he is old. Because he is and alone. On that sloping armchair. But more because there is no turning back for him.’

The Whale House

Sharon Millar

‘By morning the dreams are gone, flying through the tiny holes in the net in sudden starling movements.’

Filsan

Nadifa Mohamed

‘Silence takes the place of all these words and her loneliness remains as dense and close as a shadow.’

You Don’t Have To Live Like This

Benjamin Markovits

‘It felt like everything that had happened to me in college, everything I had learned to be comfortable with, had produced this jerk standing naked in the water, splashing his best friend’s girlfriend in the chest.’

Tomorrow

Joanna Kavenna

‘She was living as herself, in herself, without ever thinking about what that meant.’

Boy, Snow, Bird

Helen Oyeyemi

‘I didn’t enclose a note, though there were a few things I’d have liked to say. Restraint is classier.’