Granta: 152 books

Louise Stern’s stories are peopled with brave young girls, out to party, travel the world, go a little bit wild. The one thing that marks them out from their peers is that they have grown up deaf. They communicate with the outside world via a complicated mixture of sign language, lip-reading, note-scribbling,...

It is announced that Jesus Christ is to visit Belgium in a few weeks time, on its national day, the 21st of July. Coincidentally, our narrator's mother dies and his marriage ends. Feeling very low, and fluctuating between resentment, irony and cynicism, he reports on the events and on the behaviour...

From her earliest years with a boozy, accident-prone father and a reluctantly pragmatic mother, Janice Galloway’s grew up as a watcher – careful and vigilant. Then her parents’ marriage broke up and mother and daughter moved to an attic above a doctor’s surgery. When her big sister Cora returned...

In the second volume of her memoirs, the prize-winning author Janice Galloway reveals how the child introduced in This is Not About Me evolved through her teenage years. When she started secondary school, Galloway was still sharing a bed with her mother and was more excited by Latin and school...

The town has lost its famed falafel king, but the Dadon family have also lost a father and husband. Living with the daily threat of Katyusha missiles from neighbouring Lebanon, and struggling to survive amid the rubble of their lives, Simona and her three children each find their own way of coping...

Growing up in a rural recording studio, Halo Llewellyn is rarely star-struck, but when one of the visiting singers gives birth to Fred, she knows right away that he's special. As the golden child grows into the gilded man, she remains dazzled by his ambition and his talent. Up on stage, being screamed...

Meet Remedy: a young, single American living on the rive gauche and toiling at an on-line fashion magazine. She may have her feet on well-trodden expat ground, but she has her head in the clouds and the path she walks through Paris is distinctly original. When she's not dreaming up articles about...

Reilly is an impoverished painter who lives alone in a shabby garret, with only his unsold canvases and his faithful dog Nimrod for company. He seems destined to remain in artistic obscurity until the most influential art critic of the time begins to notice his talent. But no sooner has he found a...

John Philips introduces the Marquis de Sade's highly original and thoroughly subversive depiction of human sexuality and the philosophical and political thinking that underpins it. He shows how, though Sade's work continues to shock, it can also be seen as the logical conclusion of eighteenth-century...

One night in 1968, on the eve of the Soviet invasion, 13 year-old Ondra and his younger brother Kamil are bundled into a coach bound for their father's birthplace, a mountainous, forested village in northern Bohemia. But when they arrive it becomes clear that this escape promises its own perils, and...

Having lost his parents at an early age, Niko has always looked to his older sister for protection. So when she starts wanting a life of her own, Niko tries everything he can think of to keep her attention, taking ever greater risks with his life and the lives of others until the day it ends in a...

'And God said, "Let there be lights in the firmament of the heavens to separate the day from the night; and let them be for signs and for seasons and for days and years."' Genesis 1: 14 Astrology, the notion that the stars and planets hold significance for human life, exists in most...

For too long DIY books have suffered the neglect of the literary establishment. Finally, here in one volume, are the essential DIY tips of the world's greatest writers. Dostoyevsky tells of a young man employed by an elderly lady to retile her bathroom; Caesar puts up a shelf for his rebellious tribe...

For Charles Fernyhough, the birth of his daughter Athena was an opportunity to re-evaluate much of what he had learned as a researcher in developmental psychology. Drawing on the detailed notes he made during her infancy, Fernyhough uses Athena's story to explain how a child's mind develops before...