One day, not long after he turned thirteen, Adam ran away from home. He woke up that morning and decided he would look for his mother.


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One day, not long after he turned thirteen, Adam ran away from home. He woke up that morning and decided he would look for his mother.
Sign in to Granta.com.
‘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.
Tash Aw is the author of four critically acclaimed novels, which have won the Whitbread First Novel Award, a regional Commonwealth Writers’ Prize and twice been longlisted for the Man Booker Prize. He is also the author of the memoir The Face: Strangers on a Pier, which was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. He was recently the Judith Ginsberg Fellow at the Columbia Institute of Ideas and Imagination in Paris. His latest novel, We, The Survivors, was published in 2019.
Photograph © Stacey Liu
‘We were trapped in a sort of double prison: by poverty in Europe, and by China and its expectations of us.’
‘Where wealth and technology go, culture quickly follows, and soon it became acceptable, even desirable, to express an interest in Japan beyond the mere practicality offered by its products.’
‘It was as if he was consciously trying to fashion an image for what he wanted the country to be: ultra-confident and unapologetic, not just severing all links with our colonial past but sticking a bold middle finger up to it while we strode chest-out into the future.’
‘No person or doll had anatomy like that. It was, she reasoned, some mistake, a dud in the assembly line, but something about it felt special, auspicious.’
A story by Adrian Van Young.
‘This was no longer a fight, Krishna realised. This was a point of no return.’
An excerpt from Hungry Ghosts by Kevin Jared Hosein.
‘The insects dissect the layers of my father’s life, our lives and my mother’s life that have collected in this sad house.’ Translated from the French by Neil Smith.
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