‘In their deepest sorrow the islanders buried the ashes of their forty-six dead’
Five weeks after the disaster, at the end of July, the islanders trooped from the church of St Helene to the eastern promontory. At the front of the cortège was the vicar and those carrying urns. These men and women tucked the urns in the crooks of their arms, or held them with both hands, solicito…
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‘The issue was the first of its kind. Trust me, it said. I know what I am talking about. These young writers are the future of literature. Watch. History will prove me right.’ – Bill Buford, Granta editor (1979-95)
‘Cover your nose and mouth, the order came, swift and useless; if they’d had their turbans they would have wound them around their faces but there were only the balaclavas.’
Fiction by Kamila Shamsie from the 2013 Best of Young British Novelists issue.
‘She felt exhausted, emptied out; she thought of the day that had passed – it was astonishing to her, that a single set of hours could contain so many separate states of violent feeling.’
Fiction by Sarah Waters from the 2003 Best of Young British Novelists issue.
‘This is the one thing I know from the minute I lift the receiver and slip that voice inside my ear: it will happen.’
Fiction by A.L. Kennedy from the 1993 Best of Young British Novelists issue.
‘As it was, my grandfather began helping me to paint without my having to ask him.’
Fiction by Kazuo Ishiguro from the 1983 Best of Young British Novelists issue.
‘Each word is a snowflake falling, and with each paragraph the snow settles deeper.’
‘I think of betrayal as a crack in the veneer of humanity, an act that reveals to us, and others, our base animal nature.’
‘Fiction, even if it’s completely made up, does say something about how you experience reality.’
Mary Gaitskill talks about her book The Devil’s Treasure.
‘Having a child, I came to see, was more a kind of haunting.’
An essay by Des Fitzgerald.
‘No person or doll had anatomy like that. It was, she reasoned, some mistake, a dud in the assembly line, but something about it felt special, auspicious.’
A story by Adrian Van Young.
