Explore Essays and memoir
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Pyre
Amitava Kumar
‘In more ways than one, the rituals of death had reminded me that I was an outsider.’
Gandhi the Londoner
Sam Miller
‘On 29 September 1888, an Indian teenager with a mild case of ringworm and a fine head of hair sailed into the Thames Estuary.’ Sam Miller on Ghandi's time in London.
The Ghost in the Kimono
Raghu Karnad
Deep in the dense volume of Delhi’s history Raghu Kardad investigates ‘the remarkable, untold story of the Japanese in the Old Fort’.
My Chess Teacher
Ricardo Lísias
‘The environment, however, wasn’t a hostile one. Though it was filled with the strangest guys in town, they were only there to play.’
Cynthia Ozick | First Sentence
Cynthia Ozick
‘Some stories begin with an incident, or a set of enigmatic circumstances, or a scene indelibly witnessed, or the relationship of unlike temperaments, or even something as gossamer as a mood. And then there is the kind of story that is rooted in an idea.’
The Question of Fate
Catherine Lacey
‘The possibility that I’d unwittingly tapped into her fate and used it as fuel for a story sickened me.’
Blood Is Usually Red
Katherine Faw Morris
‘A lot of babies were born in skiffs during storms, their umbilical cords cut with rusty pocketknives.’
Melinda Moustakis | First Sentence
Melinda Moustakis
‘We all would like to think that with one line, one brush, we could make a reader fall madly in love, and there are writers that elicit such a response with the appropriately gorgeous.’
Chasing Wolves in the American West
Adam Nicolson
‘It is the wildest part of the American South-West and, in a way, its most beautiful.’
Sasayama
Nadifa Mohamed
‘It was in one of those listless summers after graduation that I found myself in the small Japanese town of Sasayama.’
