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← Back to all issuesGranta 81: Best of Young British Novelists 2003
Spring 2003
Who are the best of young British novelists? Five Granta judges read and deliberated. This issue, with new fiction from all twenty writers, was their answer in 2003.
From this Issue
|Granta 81
Best of Young British Novelists 2003: Introduction
Ian Jack
‘What had been an exercise to publicize the literary novel, at a time when there were few spotlights on this particular branch of culture, might now have a new role as an independent consumer's guide to novelists who deserved to be read in an era where 'a thrilling debut by a young writer of enormous talent' is the standard blurb, and where there are now so many spotlights directed by marketing money and the size of the writer's advance.’
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Helen and Julia
Sarah Waters
‘She felt exhausted, emptied out; she thought of the day that had passed—it was astonishing to her, that a single set of hours could contain so many separate states of violent feeling.’
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Dinner with Dr Azad
Monica Ali
‘Six months now since she'd been sent away to London. Every morning before she opened her eyes she thought, if I were the wishing type, I know what I would wish.’
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Gas, Boys, Gas
Andrew O’Hagan
‘The men were quiet. They said nothing for a minute and the sea at my back was calm and almost imaginary, but you could hear the waves coming to wash the chalk cliffs from under us.’
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At The Villa Cockroft
Dan Rhodes
‘The young man dug into his pocket, and brought out a card. On it was printed: CARTHUSIANS COCKROFT-CONDUCTOR, COMPOSER, RACONTEUR. Underneath was his address and phone number.’
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Field Study
Rachel Seiffert
‘The bushes grow dense across the top of the drop, but Martin can just see through the leaves: young mother and son, swimming in the pool hollowed out by the waterfall.’
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The Hare
Toby Litt
‘All along I had been expecting this quest after an image or idea or ideal to end with a confrontation with myself—myself as a hare upon a steep Welsh hillside gazing towards myself as a boy, within a twenty years vacated farmyard. I did not foresee this journeying as a hare towards a hare's longing; neither did I foresee companionship.’
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After Caravaggio’s Sacrifice of Isaac
Rachel Cusk
‘I dream about Ian, not the same dream, different dreams, but they're all sort of similar. Like, we're getting on a train, me and him, and I put him on with all our bags and then I get off because I want to buy a newspaper or something and next thing I know the train's pulling away with me still on the platform and Ian looking at me through the window.’
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The Costa Pool Bums
Alan Warner
‘The corpse's senseless, sunglassed face leaned slowly forward and its cold forehead touched, with a tender benediction, the stowed and never-used table in the seat back in front of him.’
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The Balance
Nicola Barker
‘She knew she'd have to have sex with him at some point soon and if she put him down over this small semantic issue it might jeopardize his performance. There were no second chances. Things were so finely balanced, after all.’
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The Clangers
Susan Elderkin
‘He runs towards the house on invisible paths of his own creation, lifting his face once in a while to check he's on collision course with the house. He's taken his T-shirt off and tied it in complicated knots around his head, sleeves flapping over his ears like a pair of ineffective wings.’
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Leading Men
Peter Ho Davies
‘Finally the film was ready, and Rotheram ran it forward for a few seconds, watching the test numbers flicker and count down, and then the opening shots from a plane descending over the city, the image pale in the still-bright room.’
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Look at Me, I’m Beautiful!
Ben Rice
‘When I came back from Gwen's I had expected to find him in the throes of his midlife koisis—you know—trimming an anal fin in the bath, or nursing a slime coat at the very least.’
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Here We Go
David Peace
‘Terry made them all stand up before the meeting could begin. He made them search the room for hidden microphones and bugs. He made them frisk each other.’
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In Time of War
Philip Hensher
‘All around the town, the forests grew, laden with fruit; the oranges and durian and mangoes glowed in the leafy dark like festival lanterns. But on the streets of India there was only warty, dried, shrunken fruit to be had, piled up in hopeful pyramids.’
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The Dreamed
Robert McLiam Wilson
‘The organization disguised a truth that he found troubling. It was the mere exemplification of the togetherness of the departed, of their unusual brotherhood. One of the strangest things about those who had left was how easily they found each other.’
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The Cyrillic Alphabet
Adam Thirlwell
‘Olga was noble. She was Amazonian. She felt exhausted and humiliated, but she also had force.’
