Granta | The Home of New Writing

Explore Fiction

After the War

Patrick French

‘My antipathy to military culture started early and it wasn't helped by living in a garrison town.’

American Objects

Lucy Ives

‘My eyes were way too large. They appeared, if this is possible, independently scandalized.’

An Unnecessary Man

Maha Harada

‘I’d lived for half a century, but I had no sense of what that meant; no particular reaction.’

And That’s How I Became a Woman

Vigdis Hjorth

‘Finn Lykke opened the door wearing jeans and a freshly-ironed, white shirt, he had made an effort.’

Fiction by Vigdis Hjorth, translated by Charlotte Barslund.

Apnoea

Daniel Galera

‘I could make you promise much worse things.’ Daniel Galera muses on unknown family histories.

Apples

David Guterson

‘He remembered the new, fresh, orchard country of his youth and the rows of apple trees his father had planted on the east bank of the Columbia River.’

As if in Prayer

Steven Heighton

‘Many of the life vests were useless fakes, nylon shells that the human traffickers had stuffed with bubble wrap, boxboard, sawdust or rags.’

Asymmetry

Lisa Halliday

An excerpt from Lisa Halliday's Asymmetry

Bachelor Life

M.J. Fitzgerald

‘At nine o’clock the man leaves the flat dressed in an elegant salmon-pink dress’.

Bastard Alias the Romantic

Yuri Herrera

‘Can you imagine what it would be like if instead of killing we cuddled?’

Bear

Naomi Ishiguro

‘My wife and I lay side by side, the bear looming over us in the same way a crucifixion scene looms above the pews inside a Catholic church.’

Short fiction by Naomi Ishiguro.

Beethoven Was One Sixteenth Black

Nadine Gordimer

‘Once there were blacks wanting to be white. Now there are whites wanting to be black.’

Best Last Minute Spa Deal for Under £40

Yara Rodrigues Fowler

‘She rings a tiny cymbal over your body. She says, The experience is finished now.’

A story by Yara Rodrigues Fowler.

Bitter Tennis

Lucy Ives

‘I don’t know much about the cosmos, but I know enough to avoid the game of tennis.’