On the night that Granta announce its once-in-a-decade selection of the twenty best British novelists aged under forty on Front Row, Book at Bedtime brings the first of five extracts or stories by some of the rising talent 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 promises to be 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Alongside the list, Granta publish short stories or extracts from as yet unpublished novels from all twenty writers on the list.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 story, a soldier questions his age old loyalty.

The writer is Kamila Shamsie
The reader is Sagar Arya
The abridger is Miranda Davies
The producer is Di Speirs. Show less