Alex Clark Knihy

With its mixture of investigative reportage, narrative non-fiction, photography, memoir, fiction and brilliant journalism, Granta 107 follows on from the critically-acclaimed summer reading issue to showcase more of the best new writing from around the world.Join Mary Gaitskill as she meditates on the meaning of a lost cat, Will Self as he walks across Tehran in celebration of the revolution, thirty years on; be there as Timothy Phillips recovers the letters of Eva Reckitt, an English woman monitored by MI5 from the 1920s until after the Second World War; read Xan Rice’s account of the Polisario’s movement for independence in the long-disputed Western Sahara; and Owen Sheers travels to Zimbabwe where his cousin is setting up an orphanage.

Features Hisham Matar on his father, who was kidnapped while living in Egypt and imprisoned by Muammar al-Gaddafi in Libya; Helen Epstein on 'fatherhood' within the prisons of San Francisco; a dictator who has styled himself as the Father of the Nation; and, Rawi Hage on Beirut, as seen through his father's eyes.

Our world is changing at a dizzying our physical environment, our communities and our cultures, how we communicate and the speed with which we adapt to new ways of experiencing and living in the world. Caught in the midst of decline and regeneration, what are we losing and what are we gaining? And how do we decide what's worth saving and what should be thrown away? In this issue, we travel to places on the cusp of staggering change, talk to people who have seen and done it all and rescue a few choice items from the recycling bin. From Ireland's Catholic priests - once exported around the world and now under threat even in their own country - to the hitherto obscure music saved from extinction via the vast exchange mart of the Internet, "Granta 105" captures moments of both disappearance and rebirth in all their complexity and strangeness.