Explore Essays and memoir
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The Fig Tree and the Wasp
Brian Chikwava
‘The day I first saw the dance was the day we had expected to end with the execution of my maternal grandfather.’
Roseland
Rebecca Lenkiewicz
‘I’m twenty-one. On a Greyhound bus going from New York to San Francisco.’
Park Life
Rupert Thomson
‘As the weeks went by, I began to realize that the park had its own unofficial and carefully calibrated infrastructure.’
Alive, Alive-Oh!
Diana Athill
‘She thought of herself as a rational woman, but while she could sleep alone in an empty house for night after night without worrying, there were other nights when her nerves twitched like a rabbit's at the least sound.’
The Lives of Brian
Brian Cathcart
’ My name is Brian Cathcart. I grew up mainly in Northern Ireland. My father was headmaster of a secondary school and my mother taught English. I come from Protestant stock, though I have no religion myself. I studied history at university. I remember the Troubles starting, the war in Biafra, the Beatles.’
Tiger’s Ghost
Jennie Erdal
‘For nearly fifteen years I wrote hundreds of letters that weren't from me. They ranged from perfunctory thank-you notes and expressions of condolence, to extensive correspondence with the great and the good: politicians, newspaper editors, bishops, members of the House of Lords.’
Protestant Boy
Geoffrey Beattie
‘I was going home to Belfast to visit my mother. It was the spring of 1998 and the weather was very good for that time of year.’
Problems for Adam and Eve
Jo McMillan
‘It is 1997, and this is the Adam and Eve, the first legal sex shop to open in China – housed here, in a state-run healthcare facility.’
On holiday with James Lord
Patrick Ryan
‘We talked about the snails in the yard that clung dying to the reeds of grass. At 5.05 he looked at his watch again. ‘Where’s the champagne?’’
A Plausible Portrait
Ted Hodgkinson
‘My friends say I am secretive and devious,’ he wrote in the introduction to Picasso and Dora. ‘They’re right.’
Brief Encounter
Rupert Thomson
‘The man on the other end told me he was looking for sexual fantasies that were about eleven sentences long.’
