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The Sins of the Mother

Jamil Ahmad

‘They are after us. I feel it in the air.’

Othello Sucks

Upamanyu Chatterjee

Younger Daughter’s declaration that ‘Othello sucks’ prompts a conflicted response from Father.

The Woman in the Moon

Carol Ann Duffy

‘Darlings, I write to you from the moon’

A Job on the Line

Desmond Barry

‘The atmosphere in the house was thick with my father's depression.’

Kashmir

James Buchan

‘I see in an instant what has brought people to the valley for four centuries.’

Parakeets

Kevin Brockmeier

‘The birds studied the mute as though he were a puzzle.’

Persist

Zaina Arafat

‘I grew obsessed with the place, thinking that getting to see it, to experience it, would make the pain of that fall go away.’

Photography: The Paris Intifada

Nick Danziger

Nick Danziger’s photographs of the troubled Paris suburb of Bagneux.

Dick Contino’s Blues

James Ellroy

‘June 22, 1958. Dig, hepcats: it’s me, five minutes after the fuzz told me my mother had been murdered.’

The Falcon

Gilad Evron

‘He once called Gihon a limb of his own body.’

Bandit

Molly Brodak

‘There are fragments of a criminal alongside fragments of a dad, and nothing overlaps, nothing eclipses the other, they’re just there, next to each other. No narrative fits.’

The Blood Drip

Brian Evenson

‘They had stumbled upon a town and tried to approach it, but had been driven off with stones.’

Where he was: Memories of my Father

Raymond Carver

‘June was summer nights and days, graduations, my wedding anniversary, the birthday of one of my children. June wasn't a month your father died in.’

Trouble at the Waterworks

Edward Blishen

‘Old age is a sustained process of injury. You are being very distinctly shot at.’