Issues
← Back to all issuesGranta 7: Best of Young British Novelists
Spring 1983
Who were the best young British novelists of the 1980s? And who among them have emerged as the most important writers of their generation? This classic issue of Granta collects new fiction from the twenty writers, judged in 1983, to be the best of their generation.
From this Issue
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Money
Martin Amis
‘How did I get like this? It can’t just be the booze and all the junk food I put away. I must have been booked in for this a long time ago.’
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Emma Bovary’s Eyes
Julian Barnes
‘Her eyes are black: passion and depth. Her eyes are green: wildness and jealousy. Her eyes are brown: reliability and ordinariness. Her eyes are violet: the novel is by Raymond Chandler.‘
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Foreign Buddies
Ursula Bentley
‘She had to explain this, and the thought crossed her mind to dwell on this personal note, to put out a feeler to test Christina's reaction to the idea of sexual experiment.’
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Extracts From The Journal Of Flying Officer J
William Boyd
‘The squadron left today for the city. The mess cold and sad, Verschoyle, with uncharacteristic generosity, said I could keep the monoplane.’
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Rose on the broken
Maggie Gee
‘They're only wild flowers. I wish I could buy you real roses. But to her they became the real roses, frail petals, each centre a sun. And they smelled of sun and beginnings, as clear and thin as the water.’
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Obsessions
Alan Judd
‘She responded to him with a mixture of haughty refusal and a suggestive acknowledgement, a grudging yielding which was what the play demanded.’
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The Writing of ‘Or Shall We Die?’
Ian McEwan
‘There was too the challenge, as I saw it, of writing a singable English, simple and clear, that could express public themes without pomposity and private feelings without bathos.’
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The Fortune-Teller
Shiva Naipaul
‘While she may have given up counting those broken vows, she had not given up making them.’
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Ol’ Black Rock
Philip Norman
‘But here, on a three-legged stool in Tennessee, the tape recorder faltered, as if at the behest of draughts, as if called on to register psychic disturbance.’
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The Five Of Us
Lisa St Aubin de Terán
‘The freezing of the money signalled the beginning of virtual penury. It also signalled the beginning of our fame.’
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Antics
Clive Sinclair
'My nubile companion, assuredly no intellectual, continued to masturbate in front of me.'
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About the Eel
Graham Swift
‘We have not yet come to the most remarkable episode in this quasi-mythological quest for the genesis of the eel.’
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My Wife is a White Russian
Rose Tremain
‘I'm in nickel and pig-iron and gold and diamonds. I like the sound of all these words. They have an edge, I think. The glitter of saying them sometimes gives me an erection.’
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Scandal
A. N. Wilson
‘His father had visited a prostitute and had been a spy. It was quite obvious to Julian that this was true. He was almost pleased to read it, for it justified his sense, never admitted to himself before, that Daddy Spoilt Everything.’
