My questioner cannot understand the stones.

‘Why are you bringing these to Israel?’

She holds out the two flints. One has complicated surface patterns of petrol blue and foxy red. I think: it resembles a map. I think: perhaps she imagines the stone is an illicit map of some kind that I am trying to smuggle into the country? I am not thinking straight.

‘I like stones,’ I say. ‘I collect them. I’ve brought these as gifts.’

‘So you do know people here?’

I’ve made a mistake. It isn’t my first. I have been lying persistently and badly for about an hour and a half now, to a variety of interrogators, in a variety of rooms in Tel Aviv airport. The rooms in which I have been questioned have been diminishing in size: entrance hall, side room, back room, booth.

The inquiries continue, looping back over the same ground with minor variations of route, seeking weaknesses in my story. There are plenty of weaknesses.

Where am I staying? Who do I know here? What is the purpose of my visit? What are my plans, exactly, day by day?

I persevere in my poor lies.

The American Colony Hotel, Jerusalem. Nobody. Academic tourism. I plan to visit the Dead Sea, Jaffa, of course Jerusalem. No, I have no intention of visiting the West Bank.

Where am I staying? Who do I know here? What is the purpose of my visit?

So it goes on. I have now assumed that they will not let me into Israel, and that I will be back on a plane to London once they’ve finished. I no longer mind about this. I just don’t want to be in these increasingly small rooms.

Later, another questioner arrives, my fourth. He is a gentle, rubbery-faced man. He doesn’t tell me his name, so I think of him as Benjamin. Benjamin is apologetic in his tone, warm in his queries, like a curious friend. I experience a sudden flowering of Stockholm syndrome. I want to tell Benjamin everything: that I am going from Tel Aviv to the West Bank, that I will be staying in Ramallah with a well-known Palestinian writer and human rights lawyer, and that we will be conducting a series of day-long walking trespasses within restricted-access Zone C landscapes. I almost tell Benjamin these things, then I stick to my answers, red-faced and sweating.

Nineteen seventy-five marked the end of the dictatorship in Spain. The repressive regimes in South American countries would hold out until the following decade, but other cultural changes were afoot. In Europe, the tradition of exiled South American writers living and working in Paris gradually came to an end. Instead of looking north for their intellectual meridian, a young generation of émigrés began seeking publication in post-Franco Spain.

The writers in this collection were all born in or after 1975.

Many of these writers have not suffered in their own skin the social and moral circumstances that haunted their predecessors. When asked, the majority expressed scepticism, with varying degrees of reticence, nervousness or irony about the idea of an author having an active role in public life. Mario Vargas Llosa, whose bid for the presidency of Peru in 1990 was the theme of Granta 36, is perhaps the most obvious example of a public and influential figure following the intellectual model of Camus or Sartre...

In 1987 I had a lot in common with many other fourteen-year­olds. I watched the Brat Pack/John Hughes films, repeatedly; I knew the Top 10 of the UK chart by heart; I cut out pictures of Rob Lowe, Madonna, a-ha from teen magazines and stuck them on my bedroom walls; I regarded the perfect ‘mixed tape’ as a pinnacle of teenaged achievement and gave thanks for not living in the dark days of LPs. But in doing all these things I merely affirmed what every adolescent growing up, like me, in Karachi could tell you – youth culture was Foreign. The privileged among us could visit it, but none of us could live there.

Instead, we lived in the Kalashnikov culture. Through most of the eighties, Karachi’s port served as a conduit for the arms sent by the US and its allies to the Afghan mujahideen, and a great many of those weapons were siphoned off before the trucks with their gun cargo even started the journey from the port to the mountainous north. By the mid-eighties, Karachi, my city, a once-peaceful seaside metropolis, had turned into a battleground for criminal gangs, drug dealers, ethnic groups, religious sects, political parties – all armed. Street kids sold paper masks of Sylvester Stallone as Rambo; East met West in its adulation of the gun and its hatred of the godless Soviets.

Novelist (Harare North) and musician Brian Chikwava on the history of revolution and sexual liberation in Zimbabwe, from the euphoric dance crazes at Independence in the early 80s to the cruel realities of life in a nation faced with economic collapse and the Aids pandemic.

I have been totting up the times that I swore never to return to Germany.

The first was in the summer of 1936 when I saw only a bit of the surface scum, but it was enough. A bunch of youngish beer bellies in brown shirts surrounded an old man and woman, poor people from my quick glance at them, who were on their hands and knees. I thought, but could not believe, that they were scrubbing the pavement. Whatever they were doing was hard and wrong, and these louts were jeering at them.

When I first came to America in the autumn of 1988, I met the Zhou brothers in Chicago. At that point they’d only lived in the city for a couple of years, yet they were already practising their amplified version of traditional hospitality. The two of them kept me company for three days as we descended into Chinese restaurants and rose into bars in the sky. Chicago was heaven to me. They were generous, gracious, never allowing a word of protest, always whisking the cheque away.

When I returned to my father’s small and slightly dilapidated office on the near South Side of Chicago in 2003 for the first time in several years, the most commonly spoken words by both him and the two drivers still left employed in his messenger service were ‘big money’. Everyone in the office said it, my father included: ‘big money’, with extra emphasis on the ‘b’ so that the word, despite its natural brevity, always came out sounding as if it consisted of two syllables. Money was always the object of the sentence, even if it was only implied, but to hear the men in my father’s office speak of it, it was only its size that mattered. If there was such a thing as ‘little money’, and in my father’s messenger service there was plenty, it was hardly, if ever, spoken of, even though it comprised the vast majority of everyone’s day, from the envelope that needed to be delivered from the South Loop to the north-west suburbs in no particular rush, to the lone box waiting to be ferried three blocks away. These minor deliveries were what kept the company running, and what paid the weekly, tax-free salaries of the constantly rotating list of drivers who could be found sprawled out in various positions on the few chairs that had been scavenged for the office. And yet like anything else on a small scale, they were generally hated by the drivers, who saw them only as a distraction from the potential big payday waiting in the shape of a fifty-box rush-hour delivery that was bound to come.

Once when I was sixteen I went down to North Avenue Beach to hook up with two West Side Hispanic girls I’d met at a rave. It was summer, I had a car, money from cutting lawns in my neighbourhood and three bottles of Boone’s Farm Strawberry Hill. The plan was to get the girls drunk, hook up with one or both of them. But after we’d finished the bottles and smoked some weed, the skinny girl lay back in the sand and said she was going to be sick. Then the darker, prettier girl started worrying that they should get home, and that was the end of it. The lake wind had been blasting us all evening anyway; the whole thing had been an enormous waste of time.

You’ll have heard how the city once ended in fire, and around these parts, it threatens to end in ice every few years or so. But once, not too long ago, Chicago flirted with ending in water, an entirely preventable man-made inundation that few saw but everybody felt – a two-billion-dollar sucker-punch tsunami that weighed in among the dozenmost costly floods in American history.

A few years ago, I wrote an article in which I confessed, in rather jocular fashion, to a fear of flying, even though – with no little show of courage – I board a plane about twenty times a year. I’m pleased to say that I now feel much more confident during flights, perhaps because I’ve grown used to it or perhaps, as the trail of years behind us grows, we become more scornful about our possible future life and more satisfied with the life we’ve already accumulated. However, over a period of at least twenty years, plane journeys – of fifty minutes, two, seven or even twelve hours – could be relied upon to transform me into a highly superstitious little boy, who reached his various destinations feeling utterly drained after the hours of tension and the indescribable effort of having to ‘carry’ the plane.

I suppose a good many people who, like me, cannot accept the teachings of any organized religion, or even conceive of anything one could call 'God', have nevertheless occasionally experienced some flicker of what seems to be the numen. To me it happens very rarely, but I still have a clear memory of its first occurrence, some eighty years ago.

Last December — three days before he went on trial for ‘publicly denigrating Turkishness’—I interviewed Orhan Pamuk. It was not and could never have been the usual sort of exchange, because we speak often: over the past three years, I have translated three of his books. We have known each other a lot longer than that. I grew up in Istanbul, on the campus of what was then Robert College and is now called Bogazici University; my father still teaches there. Pamuk attended Robert Academy, which in those days was on the same campus; I went to the sister school on the neighbouring hill. So the Istanbul that Pamuk describes in his books is the lost city of our youth.

One night some years before I was born, my mother balanced a ladder on two thick branches within the canopy of a tall tree and climbed upwards, emerging out of the leaves and flowers, her arms free and outstretched as she arrived at the topmost rung.

Hardy called it ‘dimmity’, the moment when the certain shapes of the world dissolve. In the emptiness of the Wessex marshlands, against the twilit mass of Glastonbury Tor, the air begins to quiver, to fill with dark scribblings. More than a million starlings are homing in on this ancestral swamp for their nightly communion. They stream in from every direction, joining, breaking ranks, floating free, like some black aurora. Suddenly, they become plasmic. They are one immense organism, pulsating like a single cell. They swing up to the sky and then skim the reeds in folds and falls of black. They fill out great parabolas and helixes, with a symmetry you do not expect from living things. Then, birds again, they fall into the reeds.

I first encountered God at my Christian-run school in Jhansi, a railway town in north India. It was the late 1970s and until then I had known only gods. My mother, a high-caste Hindu, had pictures and statues of many divine men, women and animals—mythical as well as living—in her miniature wooden temple at home. It wasn't clear which of these little gods in their tinselly splendour was in charge. Certainly, my mother did not feel the need to exalt one over the other. However, the Protestant Christians who ran my school insisted on a religious hierarchy, claiming that there was no god but God—their own; and they expended much effort in trying to rescue the mostly Hindu pupils from their idol-worshipping families.

Three years ago I was raped. A man broke into my flat in Camden in the middle of the night, woke me up by punching me in the face, menaced me with my own carving knife, tied me up, raped me and then threatened to burn me alive. Against overwhelming odds, I escaped. Afterwards I found myself saying over and over again, 'Thank you, God, for saving me.' I never once thought, 'Why did You let this happen to me?'

Between the ages of nine and fourteen, I sat in church each Sunday, waiting for God. My hopes weren't high, even to begin with, so I felt no bitterness when He didn't reveal Himself, merely bemusement at what all those prayers had been in aid of. If honest piety couldn't flush Him out, even as a passing shadow or sudden gust of wind, what could?

A few hours before my mother died, eventually of pneumonia, the disease they call ‘the old man’s friend’, in a small side room with muted lighting in our local hospital, there was a deluge of rain. I can’t recall whether curtains or a blind screened the window, but I remember being puzzled by the sudden hissing noise, and crossing the room to peer outside, and seeing flat roofs, and the sheeting rain in the October night. The sound of the rain, and of my mother’s breathing.

There is a distance to fatherhood that isn’t part of motherhood. In our earliest days, fathers are necessarily a step away. We don’t have an inter-uterine life with our fathers, aren’t expelled from their bodies in birth, don’t nurse at their breasts. Even though our infancies are forgotten, the stamp of those days remains in us, the first exchanges between mother and baby, the back and forth, the rocking, soothing, the holding and looking. Fathers, on the other hand, enter the stage from elsewhere. More exciting than pacifying, they often bring with them rousing games and rough and tumble play. I vividly recall my own baby’s joyous face as she straddled her father’s jumping knee. He regularly turned her into ‘Sophie Cowgirl’, and the two took wild rides together as my husband provided the shoot-’em-up sound effects.