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Five writers on Granta's list of the 20 best British novelists under 40. A young man returns from training to his rural home to find it unchanged, but no longer where he belongs.

Following the announcement of Granta's once-in-a-decade selection of the twenty Best Young British Novelists aged under forty for 2013, Book at Bedtime brings five stories or extracts by some of the writers on the list to the airways.

Granta's first generation-defining list of writers was published in 1983, and that and subsequent lists in 1993 and 2003 have garnered considerable attention and debate. This year's list is no different, focussing the spotlight on writers who will go on to become household names, as their predecessors from Amis to Tremain, McEwan to Winterson have done.

Alongside the list, Granta publish short stories or extracts from as yet unpublished novels from all twenty writers on the list. Di Speirs, Editor of Readings, has read the stories 'blind', and picked five that reflect the diversity and range of the material and the writers, which will be broadcast across the week.

In stories that range from the wilderness to the domestic hearth via a dystopian nightmare, and that question long held loyalties or expose the powerlessness of the immigrant, this brand new and exciting work reflects the vibrancy and vivid imagination of the next generation of British novelists.

In today's story, A World Intact, by Adam Foulds - a writer known for his lyricism - set in the last years of the Second World War, a young man returns from training to his rural home to find it unchanged - but no longer where he belongs.

The writer is Adam Foulds
The Reader is Harry Lloyd
The abridger is Julian Wilkinson
The producer is Di Speirs.

15 minutes

Credit

Role Contributor
Producer Di Speirs

Broadcast

  • Thu 18 Apr 2013 22:45

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