Cynan Jones

‘In the car lights he could see just beyond the runs the bodies of cars like some disassembled ghost train littering the field.’

Issue 119

Mark Haddon

Pico Iyer

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

Mishka Henner

‘There is of course an absurdity to these censored images since their overt, bold and graphic nature only draws attention to the very sites that are meant to be hidden.’

Caspar Henderson

‘Often, a road is the least interesting path to follow.’

Ishion Hutchinson

‘The train station was a cemetery. / Drunk with spirits, another being entered.’

Issue 118

Aleksandar Hemon

‘He never bothered the refugees, never barked at those miserable people.’

Apricot Irving

‘His heart is a tired engine with too many loose screws and faulty wires, not weightless like the tissue-thin kites he used to fly with his grandfather as the string danced between his fingers.’

Ted Hodgkinson

A compilation of some of the best readings of 2011, including Binyavanga Wainaina reading from his memoir One Day I Will Write About This Place, Robert Coover’s reading of his online story ‘Vampire’ and Granta debut contributor Taiye Selasi's reading of ‘The Sex Lives of African Girls’.

Erin Frances Fisher

‘When her eyes adjust to the dark she sees it is full, so full: the lights from long dead stars churn elliptics, spiral with dying vibrations and decaying harmonics.’

Scott Johnson

‘Sometimes, these sorts of details made their way into wire stories as bullet-pointed footnotes. Other times, the stories screamed into the lives of people I knew.’

Caspar Henderson

‘Monsters of one kind or another are woven into virtually all the cultures of which we have record.’

Sarah Hall

‘Her old lovers were ghosts. None of them had survived; none were missed.’

Yuka Igarashi

‘Violence and genius and terror and mysticism reside in equal parts in the so-called heroes and so-called villains. It wells up and pervades us. We swim in it.’