At five in the afternoon, the Bahia de Abyla sailed out of Algeciras. It was the last ferry of the day, and Thomas Wavery was on his way to Africa, having spent the morning in Gibraltar.


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‘At five in the afternoon, the Bahia de Abyla sailed out of Algeciras.‘
At five in the afternoon, the Bahia de Abyla sailed out of Algeciras. It was the last ferry of the day, and Thomas Wavery was on his way to Africa, having spent the morning in Gibraltar.
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‘The slutty ingenuity of vegetables when it comes to desire and reproductive methods is a marvel.’
Rebecca May Johnson negotiates allotment culture.
‘Globalisation is incomplete: money can go anywhere, but laws cannot.’
Oliver Bullough on one of Britain’s most contested outposts: the British Virgin Islands.
‘You discover during your very first lessons that the problem of singing better involves overcoming many other problems you had not ever imagined.’
A new story from Lydia Davis.
‘She began to count; it was easier this way, counting, because she would not have to remember how she felt.’
An excerpt from Ukamaka Olisakwe’s Ogadinma.
‘Like any desert, I learn myself by what’s desired of me—
and I am demoned by those desires.’
From Postcolonial Love Poem by Natalie Diaz.
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.’
‘If you like people who hate each other, it’s paradise.’
‘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.’
‘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.’
‘He told me he had quit his job the day after the earthquake and came out here with nothing but a sleeping bag.’
‘I told him he looked like an assassin in an Elmore Leonard novel, and he smiled.’
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