"As writers we have a responsibility, sometimes, to make the future seem real.” John Ironmonger
Welcome to the Green Zone

Welcome to the Green Zone

IT’S NOT LIKE I WAS EXPECTING STALINGRAD, but Baghdad took the piss. Arriving for the first time, tucked into a UN car, I watched as the city lights refracted through the bulletproof glass. Floodlights hovered over a pickup football game, square lamps uplit the National Museum, fairy lights dripped down...
She-devils and evil monsters

She-devils and evil monsters

IT IS TEMPTING, WHEN READING cases of historical murder, to find comfort in the knowledge that there lies a distance of hundreds of years between us and those dreadful events. We may look upon the laws and attitudes of the early moderns as relics of a bygone age, and perhaps...
Under the circumstances

Under the circumstances

SWEET AIR, DIVINE LIGHT! How long have we waited for this happy sight? This ancient city, its sun-baked streets, the Acropolis in the distance, raging with light. We are here, so it begins. The first night. Everybody orders wine. It comes in little jugs called carafes. Red or white, it...
The causes of a life: Mary Shelley in Bath

The causes of a life: Mary Shelley in Bath

STRICTLY SPEAKING, OF COURSE, it wasn’t Mary Shelley who arrived in Bath on 10 September 1816, but Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin. The nineteen-year-old who alighted in the city that Tuesday afternoon wasn’t yet the wife of Percy Bysshe Shelley, the up-and-coming poet and heir to a baronetcy. Instead, she was his...
Climate change: truth and fiction

Climate change: truth and fiction

DAVID BOWIE HAD A remarkable talent for writing songs that could conjure up a story. It is impossible to listen to ‘Space Oddity’ without imagining Major Tom sitting in a tin can, drifting forever into space. But the Bowie song that stays with me most is ‘Five Years’. It tells...
Friends and traitors

Friends and traitors

IMAGINE A GROUP OF BEST FRIENDS from university, now in their early forties, reuniting for a weekend to celebrate their enduring friendship. But this isn’t just any reunion – they’re about to open predictions they made about each other twenty years ago. This is the intriguing premise of Holly Watt’s...
Dark, ingenious and daring: Pretty Ugly by Kirsty Gunn

Dark, ingenious and daring: Pretty Ugly by Kirsty Gunn

THE WAY PEOPLE TALK ABOUT short stories often inclines to silversmithing analogies: burnished, finely wrought, beautifully crafted. That, or Fabergé eggs. And we say short story collection rather than group. Collection suggests careful selection from an array of available possibilities, white daisies on a vast lawn. In the afterword of...
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Message in two suitcases

Message in two suitcases

There is an old Urdu/Hindi word that would suit well this explosively funny, irresistible, and profoundly tragic human comedy: lifafa/lifaafaa, a term that can mean a bag, an envelope, a wrapper or a cover, anything frail, or an outward show. Mama Tandoori is all of these and indeed much more, a surging personal narrative and...
The Leica way

The Leica way

In his previous book, Norwegian Wood (MacLehose Press, 2015), Lars Mytting composed an elegy to trees – not only as an elemental form of life, as symbols, and as the other, vital half of the animate cosmos, but also in their immutable relation to man. Norwegian Wood is about the transcendental materiality of timber, logs,...
A biblical paradise

A biblical paradise

An impish dog playing tricks on his mistress brings about a meeting that will change the life of a monarch. Or so goes the story in Alan Bennett’s The Uncommon Reader, where a corgi-chasing Elizabeth II runs into a travelling library. The rest is a journey into a world of enchantment, discipline, determination, revelation. What...
Curious about curiosity

Curious about curiosity

Adventurous forgetting is common with scholars. The urge to move beyond the page estranges us from the work. We chase the next illuminating ‘maybe’, losing sight of the words we began with. The problem is not iconoclastic interpretation; not disorienting or disturbing responses – this is all the stuff of creative reading. “There is a...
Suspicious country

Suspicious country

Right after the diagnosis, I find it nearly impossible to read. I can’t think clearly, and I don’t have the patience for the development of other people’s ideas and images. “Yeah, I had that, too,” my mom says when I mention it to her. “I did a lot of staring at the wall. And I...
Elegy in E minor

Elegy in E minor

Of a summer in Spain, where she is vacationing as a university student, M.A. will mostly recall “the portraits of Franco; you thought that was just his first name and you were surprised everyone was on such familiar terms with a head of state.” It is this subtle blend of French phlegm, disingenuously simulated naiveté...
Going it alone

Going it alone

What springs to mind when you hear the term ‘single mother’? Despite the passage of time, the opening of minds and general social progression, the term still comes loaded with negative connotations. Around a quarter of UK families are headed by a lone parent, and 90% of them are women. If some headlines are to...
Every way out

Every way out

The shortlist for the 2017 Polari First Book Prize, announced at the Polari Literary Salon at London’s Southbank Centre on 31 July, brings together an eclectic and provocative range of fiction and non-fiction from Cardiff to Kuwait and beyond that throws light on the LGBT experience from surprising angles. Now in its seventh year, the...
The summer Smiley saved me

The summer Smiley saved me

In the summer of 1989, breaking up with a man I had been engaged to marry, I flew to Taipei. I didn’t have a job, but I was sure I could teach English. I didn’t have a place to live, but I had the address of a hostel with hundreds of beds. I had a...
Never a dull word

Never a dull word

In April 2015 a delightful story by Fleur Jaeggy, ‘The Saltwater House’, appeared in my inbox. As I read it the Italian seemed to turn into English spontaneously in my brain. It had been sent by a friend in Milan to a friend in New York who then forwarded it to me. It was a...
Cat

Cat

Observing others is always interesting. On a train, in airports, at conferences, while waiting in line, when sitting across from someone at a table; on any occasion, in fact, that people flow into. Even someone who doesn’t travel or is very much alone will at some point go out on the street for half an...
In the shadow of Poe

In the shadow of Poe

It’s commonplace to credit Edgar Allan Poe with inventing the modern mystery story with his trio of tales featuring the Parisian detective C. August Dupin. Poe’s innovation explains why to this very day the annual awards given by the Mystery Writers Association are called the Edgars. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle freely acknowledged that Poe had...