Britain: Spring 2012 - Couverture souple

The Paul Smith-designed cover shows a chipped and cracked tea cup, its broken-off handle lying beside it. The implied idea the break-down of respectability is nicely in keeping with the collection's overall tone . . . There's a beautifully measured Jon McGregor story about the aftermath of a young girl's disappearance from a northern village; a visceral, pulsating account of a badger baiting by Cynan Jones; and a funny but vicious story set in a shambolic household of meds dealers by Adam Foulds. Mark Haddon's superb 'The Gun' about two boys misbehaving with a Remington in the woods works a similar terrain . . . There is also a series of arresting photographs on the theme of 'Home' including Leonie Hampton's haunting assemblage and several poems, including Simon Armitage's very fine 'The Making of the English Landscape' --Will Skidelsky, Observer New Review

In his superb account of walking along the Essex coast's Broomway Britain's deadliest offshore pathway Robert Macfarlane captures the eerie dislocation of the mist creeping in as it leaves walkers stranded . . . In his hard-edged childhood memoir, Gary Younge points to the alienation of life as the son of Barbadian immigrants and of growing up in a leafless postwar-planned environment . . .Britain s ever-shifting landscape, every piece here cannily conveys, is one in which it is not always possible to feel safely, snugly at home. --Robert Collins, Sunday Times

The recent editions of Granta have all done what a good literary magazine should: showcase the newest by the best authors and the best by the newest authors . . . There are excellent evocations of rural Wales (in Cynan Jones 'The Dig') of Scotland in 1964 in Robin Robertson's poem named after that year, of Ireland under British rule . . . What is fascinating is seeing how the writers here describe England . . I'd single out the work by Robert Macfarlane and Don Paterson as among the most exciting. --Stuart Kelly, Scotland on Sunday

In 2012, Britain is a nation in flux, managing difficult socioeconomic realities, contending with new political alliances and negotiating shifting demographics. Yet it is a country that is still perceived as being bound by tradition and class structures. With new fiction, memoir, poetry, photography and art, Granta's Britain explores landscape, identities and stories of the British Isles. In 'Silt', Robert Macfarlane writes of the beauty and danger of a stretch of coastline in Essex. Nobel laureate Mario Vargas Llosa tells the story of Irish revolutionary nationalist Roger Casement, executed at Pentonville Prison in 1916. Memoirs by Gary Younge, Andrea Stuart and Nikolai Khalezin and Natalia Kaliada focus on the upheavals and migrations that brought them and their families to (and from) Britain. Rachel Seiffert, Ross Raisin, Cynan Jones and Jim Crace provide extracts of their new novels: Seiffert describes Glasgow and Northern Ireland in the 1990s; Raisin paints a portrait of a young footballer struggling with his identity; Jones follows a boy on a strange, dangerous outing with his father; Crace shows how the lives of English farmers changed during the Enclosures in the late 1700s and early 1800s. The issue includes original short fiction by Adam Foulds, Mark Haddon, Tania James and Jon McGregor as well as poems by Simon Armitage, Jamie McKendrick, Don Paterson and Robin Robertson. It also introduces a new voice, Sam Byers, with an extract from his darkly comic debut novel, Idiopathy.