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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.
Luc Sante was born in Verviers, Belgium and now lives in New York. 'Lingua Franca', published in Granta 59: France: The Outsider, was taken from The Factory of Facts, published by Granta in 1998.
More about the author →‘About forty per cent of Americans describe themselves as 'born again', a designation that covers a great many separate creeds, even, these days, a certain strain of Roman Catholicism.‘
‘In order to write of my childhood I have to translate. It is as if I were writing about someone else. As a boy, I lived in French; now, I live in English.’
‘Time in its passing casts off particles of itself in the form of images, documents, relics, junk.‘
‘Justine was at my lab table, pulling at the ends of her black bob, shoving her hair into her mouth.’
An excerpt from Justine, out with Tin House Books.
‘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.’
‘The call of the muezzin reached his ears only as a muffled wail, the keeper of ritual and the passage of time.’
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