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The Red Notebook
Paul Auster
‘In 1973 I was offered a job as caretaker of a farmhouse in the south of France.’
Memoir by Paul Auster.
Eight Arms to Hold You
Hanif Kureishi
‘One day at school–an all-boys comprehensive on the border between London and Kent–our music teacher told us that John Lennon and Paul McCartney didn't actually write those famous Beatles songs we loved so much.'
The Many Colours of Blood
Candia McWilliam
‘We lived much of our life in the houses of others, and in our own house there lived with us most of the time people other than ourselves.‘
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 Bizarre Courtship
Ben Okri
‘One morning, more golden than yellow, I went outside to our housefront and saw that the beggars had gone.‘
West
Caryl Phillips
‘Curling herself into a tight fist against the cold, Martha huddled in the doorway and wondered if tonight she might see snow.‘
German Efficiency
Heinrich Böll
‘I hate the man who stood back to back with me for the hour-long journey from Düsseldorf to Cologne.’
The Great Migration
Hans Magnus Enzensberger
‘For a long time there was greater anxiety in Europe about the consequences of emigration than of immigration.’ From 1992, Hans Magnus Enzensberger on migration. Translated by Martin Chalmers.
Liberation Day
Christa Wolf
‘The world stubbornly refused to end and we were not prepared to cope with a world that refused to end.’
