Are We Related?: The New Granta Book Of The Family (Granta Anthologies) - Softcover

An endless pleasure, finding something rich and complex in the family history boom - Books of the Year, Evening StandardWriting as fine as this is consolation in itself - a reminder that, however desperate your circumstances, however difficult your life, you are not alone - HeraldThe whole collection sings with a depth of complex, contradictory, feeling that is heartfelt, concise and awash with interior life ... The sharpness - the cutting edge of piece after piece - is what imbues this book with its glorious, sometimes disturbing, memorability. From the very first sentence of Linda Grant's foray into the twilight world of her mother's descending dementia, all the way to Ali Smith's snapshot of her father, there isn't a dud: not even a whimper or hollow gesture to loosen the reader's rapt concentration - ScotsmanAt the core of most of the writing is the power balance between siblings, or parent and child, and the difficulties of adjustment as that shifts with age ... But this is not a book without hope. There is love aplenty, though it is often contorted and misused - TelegraphA rich collection of family writing - Daily TelegraphMoving and, ultimately, uplifting - Amber Pearson, Daily MailA terrific collection of stories, mostly true ones, about families, mostly dysfunctional ones ... All of these are beautifully written - William Leith, Evening StandardIn such a varied collection it is hard to select preferences. A fine balance of black humour, intensity of observation, originality of angle and a tone of compassion rather than anger, finally got my casting vote - Jack Carrigan, Catholic Heral

Granta magazine has published some of the best writing about family relationships in the English language. Over the years its writers have dealt with the most difficult, the most important and the most personal relationships of their lives. Granta Books' publication, in 1993, of Blake Morrison's And When Did You Last See Your Father? heralded the huge rise in popularity of the literary memoir, and since then Granta has carried pieces of non-fiction and fiction about the family from writers including Doris Lessing, Jane Anne Phillips, Hanif Kureishi, Jackie Kay, Helen Simpson, Linda Grant, Orhan Pamuk, Graham Swift, Ian Jack, Justine Picardie, Edmund White, Joy Williams, John McGahern, Jon McGregor, Paul Theroux, A. L. Kennedy, Siri Hustvedt and David Goldblatt. The New Granta Book of the Family collects together a stunning variety of pieces about every member of the family.