They lived in London at the end of the nineteen eighties. His wife was twenty-four. He was twenty-six. In her job, she earned eleven thousand pounds a year, and he earned thirteen thousand pounds a year.


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They lived in London at the end of the nineteen eighties. His wife was twenty-four. He was twenty-six. In her job, she earned eleven thousand pounds a year, and he earned thirteen thousand pounds a year.
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‘She must have loved gold seeing that everything in the penthouse was gold. We didn’t sit. Fear didn’t let us see where to sit.’ A story by Adachioma Ezeano.
‘I had also, a week earlier, been fired for trying to sleep with my boss’s husband. I got the idea from a book, or maybe every book.’ A story by Emily Adrian.
‘The Mitsubishi conglomerate controls a forty per cent share of the world market in bluefin tuna; they are freezing and hoarding huge stocks of the fish every year.’ Katherine Rundell on extinction speculation.
‘Two roof tiles are missing to the rear: the kiss of death. Without repair, ruination is now inevitable. Until then, this is my best hope of shelter.’ Cal Flyn visits the island of Swona in northern Scotland.
‘I’m on the cliff of myself & these aren’t wings, they’re futures. / For as long as I can remember my body was a small town nightmare.’ A poem by Ocean Vuong.
Philip Hensher was born in south London, where he still lives. He was educated at Oxford and at Cambridge, where his doctorate was on eighteenth-century English painting, and worked for six years as a clerk in the House of Commons. His novels are Other Lulus (1994), Kitchen Venom (1996), which won a Somerset Maugham Award, Pleasured (1998), The Mulberry Empire (2002) and The Northern Clemency (2008). His short stories are collected as The Bedroom of the Mister’s Wife (1999). In addition he wrote the libretto for Thomas Adès’s opera, Powder Her Face.
More about the author →‘I liked his humourless intelligence, so redundant and so excessive in an MP.’
‘Fiction, even if it’s completely made up, does say something about how you experience reality.’
Mary Gaitskill talks about her book The Devil’s Treasure.
‘No one goes unpunished. They’re men of cattle and blood.’
An extract from Of Cattle and Men by Ana Paula Maia, translated by Zoë Perry.
‘Sometimes, in the shower, he finds new and surprising bruises, whose origin he can’t place.’
A story by Niamh Donnelly.
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