Now that I’m no longer living in India, whenever there’s a hot day I think of a huge swimming pool in Bombay and Sylvia Billington.


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‘If you like people who hate each other, it’s paradise.’
Now that I’m no longer living in India, whenever there’s a hot day I think of a huge swimming pool in Bombay and Sylvia Billington.
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‘There’s this paradoxical nostalgia where even though yi suffered, yi miss it.’
Memoir by Graeme Armstrong.
‘She boils her sentences down to high-sucrose sweeties and calibrates her tone for maximum engagement.’
Fiction by Natasha Brown.
‘The monstrous years of my late teens lay lined up alongside the rest of my life like bullets in a gun.’
A story by Sophie Mackintosh.
‘Without waiting for me she removes her white shirt. Each button a piece of my own spine, undone.’
Fiction by K Patrick.
‘I followed him onto the dancefloor and he put his hands on my hips as if he’d known me for at least an hour.’
Fiction by Saba Sams.
Nicholas Shakespeare was one of Granta's Best of Young British Novelists in 1993. He has written for Granta on Abimael Guzman, Martha Gellhorn and Tasmania, the background to his most recent novel, Secrets of the Sea. He is also the author of a biography Bruce Chatwin, and is currently preparing an edition of Chatwin's letters.
More about the author →‘What clipped the wings of her fiction and grounded her imagination was precisely what made her soar as a journalist.’
‘By coming to Tasmania, I'd repeated the pattern of an ancient, unknown relative and the discovery pleased me in a profound and mysterious way.’
‘At five in the afternoon, the Bahia de Abyla sailed out of Algeciras.‘
‘They called him Presidente Gonzalo, but his name was Abimael Guzmán. I had come to Lima to find Guzmán, although I knew I wouldn't succeed.’
‘I want the reader to be conscious of reading and not being just drawn into the book and forgetting themselves and forgetting their life.’
Claire-Louise Bennett on her novel Checkout 19.
‘When one of the fishermen starts belting out ‘All My Rowdy Friends Are Coming Out Tonight’, it feels like a prophecy come to life.’
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