Issues
← Back to all issuesGranta 72: Overreachers
Winter 2000
Why do we always want more? Why do we never give up? When do we stop?
From this Issue
|Granta 72
Overreachers
Richard Ford
‘Madeleine Granville was standing at the hotel window of the Queen Elizabeth II, trying to decide which tiny car far below on Mansfield Street was her yellow Saab’.
|Granta 72
The Hotel Capital
Olga Tokarczuk
‘At the same time I take off my exotic language, my strange name, my sense of humour, my face lines, my taste for food not appreciated here, my memory of small events—and I stand naked in this pink and white uniform as if emerging from the sea mist.’
|Granta 72
Pronek in History
Aleksandar Hemon
‘This happened on a night train to Linz: swarthy-faced robbers startle Adolf and strip his felt jacket halfway down his arms so he cannot move them (their long nails scratching him just above his elbow)’.
|Granta 72
Sierra Leone
Teun Voeten
‘Sierra Leone is a small country on the coast of West Africa of roughly the same size and population as Scotland: 28,000 square miles, about five million people’.
|Granta 72
But Richard Widmark
Nik Cohn
‘I ask my wife what she means by kidnap exactly, but she says never mind’.
|Granta 72
Whale
Panos Karnezis
‘Whale arrived at work a little after seven with black circles round his eyes’.
|Granta 72
The Ascent of Man
Joseph O’Neill
‘One June dusk in 1999 I found myself walking across a rice field near Fishing Pond, in east Trinidad, in the company of a game warden and a self-described naturalist-at-large sometimes known as the Turtle Man.’
|Granta 72
The Trout Opera
Matt Condon
‘On the veranda of the Buckley's Crossing Hotel, reclining in dimpled leather armchairs, Judges Carrington and Thorpe observed in silence the giant trout shuffling across the bridge’
|Granta 72
When I Was Lost
James Hamilton-Paterson
‘Maybe the trick is to find your surroundings so engrossing, so diverting, as to be unaware that anyone is missing you. The chances are nobody is’.
|Granta 72
Against Travel Writing
Robyn Davidson
’Shortly after its publication in 1980 I was surprised to learn that I had written a travel book’.
