
In 2012, Britain is a nation in flux, managing difficult socioeconomic realities, contending with new political alliances & negotiating shifting demographics. Yet it is a country that is still perceived as being bound by tradition & class structures. With new fiction, memoir, poetry, photography & art, Granta's Britain explores landscape, identities & stories of the British Isles. In ' Silt', Robert Macfarlane writes of the beauty & 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 & Nikolai Khalezin & Natalia Kaliada focus on the upheavals & migrations that brought them & their families to (and from) Britain. Rachel Seiffert, Ross Raisin, Cynan Jones & Jim Crace provide extracts of their new novels: Seiffert describes Glasgow & 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 & early 1800s. The issue
Includes:: original short fiction by Adam Foulds, Mark Haddon, Tania James & Jon Mc Gregor as well as poems by Simon Armitage, Jamie Mc Kendrick, Don Paterson & Robin Robertson. It also introduces a new voice, Sam Byers, with an extract from his darkly comic debut novel, Idiopathy.