麻豆约拍

Following the announcement of Granta's once-in-a-decade selection of the twenty Best Young British Novelists aged under forty for 2013, Book at Bedtime brings five stories or extracts by some of the writers on the list to the airways.

Granta's first generation-defining list of writers was published in 1983, and that and subsequent lists in 1993 and 2003 have garnered considerable attention and debate. This year's list is no different, focussing the spotlight on writers who will go on to become household names, as their predecessors from Amis to Tremain, McEwan to Winterson have done.

Alongside the list, Granta publish short stories or extracts from as yet unpublished novels from all twenty writers on the list. Di Speirs, Editor of Readings, has read the stories 'blind', and picked five that reflect the diversity and range of the material and the writers, which will be broadcast across the week.

In stories that range from the wilderness to the domestic hearth via a dystopian nightmare, and that question long held loyalties or expose the powerlessness of the immigrant, this brand new and exciting work reflects the vibrancy and vivid imagination of the next generation of British novelists.

In today's extract, The Reservation, by Sarah Hall - a writer known for her muscular language and unflinching eye - a daughter leaves behind the wilds of Idaho to return to the wilderness she grew up in, and her dying mother.

The writer is Sarah Hall
The Reader is Olivia Coleman
The abridger is Miranda Davies
The producer is Di Speirs.