‘Now I understand the meaning of — it just happened. Or — it was an accident.’
Was there ever a time you thought — I am doing this on purpose, I am fucking up and I don’t know why?
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‘Ian was a gifted journalist and editor of immense common sense, and had an insatiable curiosity about the world around him. We will miss him.’
Editor of Granta, Sigrid Rausing, remembers Ian Jack.
‘It was a peculiar, alopecic landscape of hummocks and gullies, with patches of grass growing on what looked like white earth, and rarely a soul to be seen.’
Ian Jack on the slag heaps of Glasgow, and the aristocratic lives built on them.
‘Could grief for one woman have caused all this? We were told so.’
Ian Jack in 1997 on the death of Diana.
‘Always and everywhere, this unequal struggle to preserve and remember.’
Ian Jack recalls the missing buildings of his hometown, Farnworth.
‘Outside wars and nuclear accidents, it is hard to think of any technological failure which has had such lasting and widespread effects.’
Ian Jack on the Hatfield train crash, from Granta 73.
‘As the brightness increases, the sky flushes with pink and red hues somewhere between birth and Armageddon.’
An excerpt from A.M. Homes’ new novel.
Read the title story from AM Homes' dazzling new collection of short stories, Days of Awe, available now from Granta Books.
‘Even for those of us who feel we have integrated our history, there can be fragments, like shrapnel, that push to the surface without warning.’
‘Blow the candle out, taste the darkness and come back changed.’
‘I said I thought it was difficult to judge the actions of war in peace because war and peace are different worlds.’
