Are We Related?: The New Granta Book of the Family
Edited by Liz Jobey
Granta magazine has published some of the best writing about family relationships in the English language. Over the years its writers have dealt with the most difficult, the most important and the most personal relationships of their lives. Granta Books' publication, in 1993, of Blake Morrison's "When Did You Last See Your Father" heralded the huge rise in popularity of the literary memoir, and since then, Granta has carried pieces of non-fiction and fiction about the family from writers including Doris Lessing, Jane Anne Phillips, Hanif Kureishi, Jackie Kay, Helen Simpson, Linda Grant, Orhan Pamuk, Graham Swift, Ian Jack, Justine Picardie, Edmund White, Joy Williams, John McGahern, Jon McGregor, Paul Theroux, A.L. Kennedy, Siri Hustvedt and David Goldblatt. "The New Granta Book of the Family" collects together a stunning variety of pieces about every member of the family.
Binding: Hard cover with dust jacket
Book Condition: Good condition
Edition: 2009
Guardian Review by Julia Blackburn: "The stories in this wonderful collection are all concerned in one way or another with the family ties that bind us and tear us apart: children and their parents; siblings and their rivalry; husbands and wives; and the struggle to deal with the absence of those who have died.
I suppose that if you come from a really happy family, then you can walk out the door and into your adult life with hardly a backward look, but if the nest in which you were reared was complicated, then you often need to try to understand what was going on before you can even find the door, let alone turn its handle.
There are good relatives among these pages, but they come alongside some dangerous, duplicitous, unlovely and seemingly unlovable ones. Here comes Edmund White's terrifying Merry Widow of a mother, "who thought her name, Delilah, was so alluring that it made her a natural for a talk show"; David Goldblatt's perfidious father, who ran an organisation called Red Stripe, the "only hands-on spanking club in Great Britain", and who was murdered in his flat by two carpet fitters who had noticed the row of "soft-drink bottles with the tops cut off all overflowing with pound coins and 50 pence pieces". Then there is Linda Grant's mother, who doesn't forget to be rude to her daughters, even though everything else is lost in a mist of Alzheimer's."
Follow the link below to view our other listings:
