This year marks the fourth Granta ‘Best of Young British novelists’, begun in 1983, but it is the first time that an audio version has been produced. Granta’s American editor, John Freeman, introduces the collection: three complete stories and 17 excerpts from work-in-progress from all 20 novelists, half of them read by the authors themselves. The result is a tremendous extra dimension of reality.
Sunjeev Sahota quotes Salman Rushdie: ‘To understand just one life you have to swallow the world.’ These 20 novelists, including Sahota, have certainly done so, with settings including Somalia, old Beijing, drug experimentation on the Burma-Thai border, Yorkshire in flood, Ghana and, in a quarter of them, the USA.
This diversity is reinforced by the narrations — the voice in your head when reading can’t match hearing Sataj Garewal’s reading of the dialogue between immigrant Asian workers in Leeds, nor the sense of bleak displacement felt by Gábor and Balázs on their seedy ‘business’ trip to London conveyed by David Thorpe’s Hungarian accent.
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