I said, ‘I fancy seeing the Pyramids.’


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‘Then he led me out into the noise and the glare and the stink.’
I said, ‘I fancy seeing the Pyramids.’
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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.
Graham Swift’s novels include Waterland, Shuttlecock and Last Orders, which won the Booker Prize in 1996. His most recent work is England and Other Stories (2014). He was one of Granta’s Best of Young British Novelists in 1983.
More about the author →‘Frank Randall had three sons: Michael, Eddy and Mark. That was fine by him‘.
‘The death of a father is, in most cases, an inevitable passage of life.’
‘Sometimes it haunts you like a knell, sometimes it's the motto for unimagined privilege.’
‘Sorting out the world! He should have sorted out himself and his own jeopardized household.’
‘The fact remains that when I did ask questions, I got the same response: genuine, not stimulated, ignorance. No one seemed to have heard of him.’
‘I’m always interested to hear about people’s writing spaces; I presume the canary is a quiet bird.’
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