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The Trials of Faisal Shahzad

Lorraine Adams & Ayesha Nasir

Pulitzer Prize-winning American journalist Lorraine Adams and Pakistani reporter Ayesha Nasir examine the life of Faisal Shahzad, the Pakistani-American who attempted to detonate a massive car bomb in New York’s Times Square.

Power Failure

Bina Shah

‘And it’s not just the heat – it’s the humidity, that succubus that pushes the heat index up by ten degrees, makes the roads shimmer with sultry mirages.’

Ants of Accra

Nii Ayikwei Parkes

‘Ants became an obsession with her – she darted with them as they changed paths, watched them find their way around obstacles placed in their way.’

Summer with my Grandmother

A.L. Kennedy

‘And this was my grandmother, this man-destroying tyrant, this magnificent perfectionist with untireable arms and unfathomable ways of seeing.’

Going Back

Sigrid Rausing

‘We rowed towards it, further out than perhaps we should have, with the particular anarchic freedom of rowing a small rubber dinghy to sea after at least two glasses of wine.’

The Ribbon of Valour

Hal Crowther

‘I'm sure there were defenders of raw meat and dark caves who lodged similar objections against the discovery of fire.’

Mum and Fritz

Tiffany Murray

‘That hot afternoon I lay back on Mum’s old Chesterfield, ill, and watched this new man in a blue, velvet jacket, fingers tick-tack-ticking through his record collection.’

Semiprecious

Henrietta Rose-Innes

‘The name meant that this area had not always been white. It meant that families had been removed from here.’ Henrietta Rose-Innes remembers Cape Town.

Fork in the Road

Leila Aboulela

‘I left Sudan in 1987 – I was 23 years old and the idea of writing was the furthest thing from my mind.’

Where do we put Mark Twain?

Malcolm Jones

‘Twain does have his literary heirs, as Hemingway pointed out in his famous proclamation that all American literature comes from one book, Huck Finn.’

Utterly Dylan

Patrick Ryan

‘I became mad and political and ironical almost overnight, and I started to feed on folk music.’

A Voice from the Vault

Benjamin Griffin

‘You ought never to edit except when awake.’

Finding Nusrat

Janine di Giovanni

‘We sat for sometime, and I found after a while that there was little I could say.’

The Book of the Dead

Janine di Giovanni

I always begin bedtime stories to my son the same way: ‘Once upon a time, a long, long time ago . . .’