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How should novelists respond to, or engage with the rapid industrial and attendant cultural and social change which India is undergoing? It is hard to imagine the writer, Anita Desai, thinking, ah, a state of the nation novel is what is required.

Reviewed by Michael McMillan Immigration is a politicised discourse in which immigrants tend to be demonised as aliens, different, strange, even dangerous – read ‘terrorist’ – others, rather than people contributing to the national culture and economy through their skills…

Caryl Phillips’ seventh collection of essays, Colour Me English, revisits the author’s chosen territories of ‘displacement, home/homelessness, race and identity’, as defined by Renée Schatteman, editor of Conversations with Caryl Phillips  (2009). It is a volume heaving with insights…

Binyavanga Wainaina won the Caine Prize for African Fiction in 2002 with his short story ‘Discovering Home’. He resurfaced three years later with his scathing, satirical essay ‘How to Write About Africa’ (Granta, 2005).

It’s the mid twentieth century, and British control over north east Africa is failing. Sudanese cotton tycoon Mahmoud Abuzeid, awarded the title Bey by Egypt’s King Farouk, is pulled between his two wives: They belonged to different sides of the saraya, to different sides of him.

Selma Dabbagh … A God in Every Stone … Kamila Shamsie … Bloomsbury, London, 2014, hb … 320pp  ISBN 1 4088 4720 6  £16.99 … www.bloomsbury.com/uk … ‘You are reading Kamila?’ asks Baronessa Beatrice Monti della Corte in the garden of Santa Maddalena – her writing retreat in Tuscany.

‘The chief problem for a story writer’, Kureishi recently wrote about American writer John Cheever, ‘particularly when it comes to a collection, is that of variety, especially if the reader wants to consume the stories in one go:

Quintessential English classics have, before now, been adapted and re-shaped to tell diasporic and subcontinental stories, some more skilfully than others.

Storytellers are magicians. Twenty years after publication of his entrancing Haroun and the Sea of Stories, Salman Rushdie has created a sequel in Luka and the Fire of Life.

In Mr Loverman, Bernardine Evaristo comes close to pulling off the perfect novel.

Romy by Shanara Phillips … The leaden sky opened up and let a drizzle of rain fall over us. Despite the downfall, the air fell still and the atmosphere was eerie. I felt as though I were drowning in the sorrow around me. As if their tears weren't enough, I could really feel their pain as they wept.

Birthday Issue Launch, Schools Project:

To celebrate the magazine’s 30th birthday, Wasafiri has been looking forward, working with a group of young students who may become tomorrow’s writers, journalists and editors, on a schools publishing project.

Wasafiri is delighted to be launching our new Special Issue, Writing the Balkans, guest-edited by writer and academic Vesna Goldsworthy. As a little taster of the issue, we’re publishing this extract here from acclaimed writer Igor Štiks (translated by Andrew Wachtel).

Natasha Soobramanien Seldom Seen, by Sarah Ridgard Hutchinson, London, 2012, hbk, 256pp, £14.99, 9780091944124, www.randomhouse.co.uk Set in Suffolk in the 1980s, this wonderful novel is about how our secrets shape us.

Gabriel García Márquez’s seminal novel One Hundred Years of Solitude topped the list of books that have most shaped world literature over the last twenty-five years…

Toby Litt Building Stories, by Chris Ware Jonathan Cape, London, 2012, hbk, 246pp, £30, 9780224078122 www.vintage-books.co.uk Chris Ware must get fairly bored with being called a genius.

On 3 October 2012, to mark the launch of Wasafiri’s Special Issue, ‘Britain and India:

Maggie Gee Out of It, by Selma Dabbagh Bloomsbury, London, 2011, pbk, 320pp, £12.99, 9781408821305, www.bloomsbury.com Selma Dabbagh’s pacy…

Following on from Marius Kociejowski’s contribution to Wasafiri (an interview with Brian Chikwava in issue 67) we interviewed the writer in a special online feature. Marius Kociejowski is a Cheltenham Prize-winning poet, essayist and travel writer living in London.

Daisy Hasan The Collaborator, by Mirza Waheed Viking, London, 2011, pbk, 320pp, £12.99, 9780670918959, www.penguin.co.uk Mirza Waheed’s The Collaborator focuses on the story of a young Gujjar boy recruited to collaborate with an official in the Indian army in the Kashmir Valley.

Award-winning Pakistani author, Bina Shah's short story, 'Peter Pochmann Goes to Pakistan', features in issue 65. Bina talks to Wasafiri's Nisha Obano about her writing, her journalism, the influence of Karachi and the growing tension in Pakistan upon her work.

Jay Bernard came to comics via poetry; her first pamphlet, Your Sign is Cuckoo Girl (2007), was followed by a graphic poem in City State (2009).

Moniza Alvi Ten: