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The House by the Gallows

Intizar Hussain

‘Along with religion, an unthinking nationalism had become the other god of Pakistan.’

Doing the Paperwork: Life in the aftermath of a violent death

David Goldblatt

‘If the pressure of their life didn’t kill her it made the fight too hard.’

Losses

Günter Grass

‘In the summer, my wife and I visited the small Danish island of Møn.’

India! The Golden Jubilee: Introduction

Ian Jack

‘I first went to India twenty years ago as a reporter.’

(nostalgia)

Juliet Jacques

‘I ended up piecing my life together through other people.’

The Error World

Simon Garfield

‘She said that the stamp gave her palpitations.’

The Rainy Season

Lindsey Hilsum

‘In Rwanda today so much is unspoken or only whispered.’

Motley Notes

Ian Jack

Ian Jack’s introduction to Granta 87: Jubilee.

Dividing the Kingdom

Pico Iyer

‘I get on the train to hear the funereal call of my boyhood: ‘Reading, Didcot Parkway, Oxford.’’

The Fall of Saigon

James Fenton

‘I wanted to see a communist victory, which I presumed to be inevitable. I wanted to see the fall of a city.’

Arguing With The Dead

Dan Jacobson

‘My childhood was spent in Kimberley, the diamond-mining town in South Africa.In those years most of the mines were no longer being worked’.

A Journey into Afghanistan

Peregrine Hodson

‘We had been travelling for a week, and had reached the territory of the Hesb Nasr: a rival group of mujahedin who were notorious for ambushing travellers, stealing their weapons and skinning their victims.’

Tibetan Dinner

Amitav Ghosh

‘The last time I'd eaten a mo-mo was as an undergraduate, in Delhi.’

Motley Notes

Ian Jack

‘The last issue of Granta celebrated its twenty-fifth anniversary and retraced a little of its pre-1979 history as a magazine for and by the students of Cambridge University.’