Are We Related? | Granta

  • Published: 02/09/2010
  • ISBN: 9781847081452
  • 128x20mm
  • 432 pages

Are We Related?

Liz Jobey

Granta magazine has published some of the best writing about family relationships in the English language. Over the years its writers have dealt with the most difficult, the most important and the most personal relationships of their lives. Granta Books’ publication, in 1993, of Blake Morrison’s And When Did You Last See Your Father? heralded the huge rise in popularity of the literary memoir, and since then Granta has carried pieces of non-fiction and fiction about the family from writers including Doris Lessing, Jane Anne Phillips, Hanif Kureishi, Jackie Kay, Helen Simpson, Linda Grant, Orhan Pamuk, Graham Swift, Ian Jack, Justine Picardie, Edmund White, Joy Williams, John McGahern, Jon McGregor, Paul Theroux, A. L. Kennedy, Siri Hustvedt and David Goldblatt. The New Granta Book of the Family collects together a stunning variety of pieces about every member of the family.

An endless pleasure, finding something rich and complex in the family history boom

Books of the Year, Evening Standard

Writing as fine as this is consolation in itself - a reminder that, however desperate your circumstances, however difficult your life, you are not alone

Herald

The whole collection sings with a depth of complex, contradictory, feeling that is heartfelt, concise and awash with interior life ... The sharpness - the cutting edge of piece after piece - is what imbues this book with its glorious, sometimes disturbing, memorability. From the very first sentence of Linda Grant's foray into the twilight world of her mother's descending dementia, all the way to Ali Smith's snapshot of her father, there isn't a dud: not even a whimper or hollow gesture to loosen the reader's rapt concentration

Scotsman

The Author

Liz Jobey is a former deputy editor of Granta. Before joining the magazine in 1998 she was editor of the Independent on Sunday ‘Review’ and literary editor of the Guardian.

More about the author →

From the Same Author

The New Granta Book of Travel

Liz Jobey

Granta has long been known for the quality of its travel writing. The 1980s were the culmination of a golden age, when writers including Paul Theroux and Bruce Chatwin, James Hamilton-Paterson and James Fenton set out to document life in largely unfamiliar territory, bringing back tales of the beautiful, the extraordinary and the unexpected. By the mid 1990s, travel writing seemed to change, as a younger generation of writers that appeared in the magazine made journeys for more complex and often personal reasons. Decca Aitkenhead reported on sex tourism in Thailand, and Wendell Steavenson moved to Iraq as foreign correspondent. What all these pieces have in common is a sense of engagement with the places they describe, and a belief that whether we are in Birmingham or Belarus, there is always something new to be discovered.

Liz Jobey on Granta.com

Essays & Memoir | The Online Edition

Are We Related?

Liz Jobey

‘Most family relationships are difficult, and sometimes they can become the most difficult human relationships of all.’

Art & Photography | Granta 91

Family Pictures

Liz Jobey & Robin Grierson

‘Photography always reveals truths about the relationship between the photographer and the person being photographed.’

Essays & Memoir | Granta 91

Lister’s Mill

Liz Jobey

‘The city has defied many plans for its regeneration and its centre is a dispiriting mess’