When something is lost, our first instinct is often towards preservation: either of the thing itself, its memory and its traces in the world, or of the part of us that is affected by what is now missing. The pieces in this issue of Granta reflect on the complex business of salvage and try to bring into the light what we discover when we come face to face with loss.

It is rarely a straightforward process. Jeremy Treglown’s thought-provoking exploration of the gathering movement to exhume the victims of the Spanish Civil War amply demonstrates the tensions created when a desire to commemorate clashes with a desire to move forward, and when both entirely natural impulses are claimed by other agendas. Although his investigation illuminates the continuing aftermath of a particularly dark and disastrous episode in Spanish history, it has clear parallels with other countries’ attempts to recover from traumatic events and forces us to question whether an apparently simple urge to remember and to pay tribute can remain uninflected by other equally complex concerns.

A similar ambiguity informs Maurice Walsh’s dispatch from Ireland, where he travelled to spend time with the Catholic priests whose numbers have been diminishing over the past few decades. He reports of a decline in vocations that coincided with a widespread rise in secularism and an attitude towards the Church that hardened – perhaps irreversibly – after the wave of child-abuse scandals in the 1990s, which were seen not merely as instances of individual wrongdoing but as evidence of a collusion between a powerful hierarchy and those whom it had sent into the community as trusted individuals. This shift in perspective has been well documented and, when the writer and I spoke about the piece in its earliest stages, we agreed that a fruitful focus would be what the priests themselves felt about this process of marginalization.

Elsewhere, we feature some extremely personal stories, perhaps none more so than Melanie McFadyean’s ‘Missing’, which relates the experiences, over nearly two decades, of the Needham family. Ben Needham, a child of twenty-one months, disappeared on the Greek island of Kos in 1991; he has never been found. The moment of his disappearance – the moment when he was last seen by members of his family – resonates through her account with its utter simplicity; a child, playing in the sun, running in and out of doors, being completely childlike and completely unselfconscious. Then silence, and absence; and then the continuing lives of Ben’s mother, Kerry, his grandparents, his uncles and the sister born after he disappeared. It is a familiar fictional device, and often characteristic of the stories we tell ourselves about defining periods in our lives, to suggest that everything can change in an instant. Much of the time, that is not really true, and rather more likely that a crisply delineated sequence of events allows us to cope with chaos and confusion. In the case of the Needhams, though, even that world-altering single moment, viewed through the prism of different people and the passage of time, can remain painfully resistant to closure.

There is a different kind of examination of the past going on in Elizabeth Pisani’s ‘Chinese Whispers’, in which the author recalls the night that she spent in Tiananmen Square twenty years ago, frantically attempting to phone in reports to her news agency as tanks (not to be confused with armoured personnel carriers, as her bosses on the other end of the line curtly impressed on her) rolled in to crush the ranks of pro-democracy protestors filling the Square.

But Pisani’s resurrection of a night that, to her, an inexperienced reporter of twenty-four, was the most momentous she had ever lived through, proves rather harder to pin down in the retelling. Is her version of events correct to the last detail? Or has she embroidered and finessed her memories in the intervening years?

Sometimes, of course, the changing of the guard makes room for us to cast a lighter eye over events, as in Don Paterson’s piece of memoir, which tells of his youthful passion – and passion is the right word – for evangelical Christianity, an effort to exoticize his everyday life that led to fervent prayer sessions enlivened by the odd bout of angeloglossia. It seems that what he discovered as his faith faded was an unshakeable enthusiasm for rational thought. But he also conjures, as the best memoirs do, a portrait of another time – in this case, a world of weak tea, Jammie Dodgers and fearsome bullies.

Equally evocative are the pipe smokers, captured in Andrew Martin’s ode to a pleasure in peril, who have found themselves defending their commitment to a slower, temptingly detached way of life – their special brand of ‘hypnotic latency’, as Martin puts it.

In among these surveys of vanishing worlds come three pieces of fiction: an artfully poignant story by Janet Frame, a wry tale of dentistry and disarray by A.L. Kennedy and two pieces of work by Altán Walker. Of Earthly Love, Walker’s debut novel, was several years in the writing, rewriting and recasting and had yet to be finished when the writer died in 2007. As I began to read the manuscript, knowing that it would never now be completed, I felt immediately that if it were to remain unseen readers would be deprived of a true delight; one that would introduce them to a wild, shifting, ungovernable voice, capable of great acts of ventriloquism and imagination. It is a real pleasure to be able to publish part of Walker’s manuscript here and to know that, in among the varieties of loss that we are often subject to, there remain treasures to find.

Bringing together these pieces about fathers and fatherhood for my first issue as Granta’s editor has been both exhilarating and very instructive. Apart from the deep satisfaction of seeing writers develop and refine their ideas and settle on the most fruitful way of expressing them, sometimes ending up in a quite different place from where they started, there has been another imperative in play. When the issue at hand involves asking people to address a subject as personal and as necessarily complex as their earliest and often most intimate relationships, to recreate and dissect the experiences that helped to form them, there is a delicate balance to be struck between maintaining the impartiality of the outside reader and intervening in private and inner lives. As the truism has it, we can all say what we like about our own families, but woe betide anyone who presumes to characterize our parents, our siblings or our children for us.

The immense rise in the popularity of memoir in recent years has made observing such delicacies far more problematic. Those who voluntarily strip bare the details of family life must, surely, be extending to the reader the right to form their own opinion; to take against, if they choose, the individuals concerned, to make judgements about their behaviour, to come to the conclusion that, after all, someone else’s family romance is simply not as interesting to us as our own.

Our criteria for selecting the pieces in ‘Fathers’ were based on the hope not that each piece of writing would extend to the universal – that seemed far too grandiose, unlikely and even undesirable an aim – but that they would be suggestive and beckoning in their specificity. I have never, for instance, played basketball, but the feelings that Benjamin Markovits describes in his meditation on the sporting coaches who steered him through high school flooded me with memories of the ambivalence that an adolescent harbours towards an authority figure; the strange mixture of embarrassment, affection, curiosity, aggression and what he perceptively calls ‘all the varieties of wrong-feeling’. One of childhood’s most furtively treasured games is to imagine how life would be if other circumstances had prevailed, and it is perhaps misguided to think that that stops when one grows up. Here, meeting fathers who were doctors, vicars, hairdressers, comedians, men who married in secret or more than once, fathers who have been faced with serious illness or bereavement, who laughed or smacked or left or made everything better or, in the end, died, feels as though it affords a fleeting understanding of why I am different from you.

Several of the fathers in this book have, indeed, died; but their children’s relationships with them have not ended. Writing about our family provides fairly incontrovertible evidence that our business with the dead, and the conversations that we have with them, not only continues after that initial separation but changes and mutates almost ceaselessly. ‘That’s what happens if you don’t do your paperwork,’ David Goldblatt writes in his frequently painful account of his father’s violent death. ‘Time comes round and takes your stories.’ He’s right: in our effort to preserve our parents and, in the process, to preserve both the particularities of our personal history and our more inchoate and communal sense of the past, we are also engaged in a battle with time. Time works on us, and it works on our memories of those closest to us: how best to confront the temptation, often unconscious, to supply definition to imperfect recollection, to exonerate or to lay blame, to commemorate or to settle scores, to downplay or to dramatize? But behind that world of difficulty is the thought of what might happen if the attempt is not made at all.

It is Granta’s job, and my ambition for it as its editor, to provide a place where all kinds of attempts can be made, whether they are provisional and preparatory or highly polished and as near definitive as might be possible. It is a particular pleasure to be able to introduce in this issue a number of new writers whose work is not yet widely known – Daniyal Mueenuddin, Francesca Segal and Justin Torres among them – alongside far more familiar names and, indeed, to witness those more well-known writers strike unfamiliar poses. At a time when the latitude granted to emerging voices to locate and connect with their readership seems increasingly under threat, and when new writing must make itself, more than ever before, easier to define, to package and to market, we hope to say as simply as possible – here is the space. Now tell us the story.