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Chang-rae Lee: 'When people asked, I'd say, "I'm writing a very strange book." I thought no one was going to get it'
At Night We Walk in Circles by Daniel Alarcón – review
Experience: I caught a falling baby
My Tanzanian family: a childhood dream come true
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Chang-rae Lee: 'When people asked, I'd say, "I'm writing a very strange book." I thought no one was going to get it'

Posted: 18 Jan 2014 12:45 AM PST

The author talks to Emma Brockes about why he decided to write a dystopian novel set in America

Chang-rae Lee was on a research trip to China, looking around a factory he imagined he might write about. He intended a piece of social realism – a novel about Chinese manual workers, along the lines of Zola's Germinal. "The place itself was like a run-down prep school," he says. "It had everything that they needed, but nothing more. And so they're accepting that monotony – hours, rules, regulations – for something greater." The set-up engendered, he thought, not just a code of conduct in the workers, but "almost a code of psyche, and that's really what got me".

The novel Lee ended up writing wasn't the one he'd planned. After returning to America, where he lives – he teaches creative writing at Princeton – the whole enterprise struck the 48-year-old as misguided.

"I thought, why am I bothering? There's all this great journalism about China these days." Instead, what germinated was an idea of the future: a dystopian novel set in America, where the descendants of immigrant Chinese workers occupy the safe, closed and relentlessly monotonous society of the kept worker class, exchanging liberty for security in a system permitting no upward advancement. The town they live in is called B-Mor, an iteration of Baltimore, after its native inhabitants have cleared out, and they work as intensive fish farmers until they die, young, of new diseases. "Our tainted world looms within us, every one," Lee writes, and admits that he was, at times, baffled by the direction of his own work. "When people asked, I'd say, I'm writing a very strange book. I thought, no one is going to get this book."

Much of this has to do with the unconventional heroine. On Such a Full Sea (the title comes from Julius Caesar: "On such a full sea are we now afloat; / And we must take the current when it serves, / Or lose our ventures") is driven by the adventures of Fan, aged 16, who leaves B-Mor to take her chances in the unpoliced "counties" outside the industrial sector. There is nothing cute about Fan; she doesn't say funny things or run an interior monologue. She doesn't say much at all; rather, she moves around the story as unselfconsciously as water.

"I meant her to be the focus of our attention, the central character," says Lee, "but not necessarily the central consciousness. She's not that sort of hero: she's not loquacious, she's not philosophical; she is more elemental. She's there, she persists. And that's the sort of person I wanted her to be."

Lee smiles. He is not overly loquacious himself. Fan is, perversely, more attractive a heroine precisely because of these things, and to maintain a space around her, Lee tells the story not from her point of view but from the perspective of the people she left behind. It is a first-person plural that contributes to the sense of her journey as mythic and was necessary, says Lee, to establish "the ways in which these folks in the dystopia need to create stories for themselves. It's the only way they can break out of their circumstance."

The tone of the narration is muted, like a held breath – Fan, before her departure, was a diver in the fish tanks, capable of extraordinary feats of free diving, which, writes Lee, left her exhausted "not by the work or holding her breath but instead from the strange exertion of pushing against the emptiness." The ellipsis of those moments in the tank seems to hang over the novel as a whole; it has the quality of something held finely but perilously in balance. It also, like the best novels, leaves a great deal unsaid. When Fan leaves B-Mor, it is ostensibly to find her missing boyfriend, but she is also propelled by a less distinct yearning, for something the factory town makes no allowance for: the sublime.

On Such a Full Sea is, at heart, a romantic novel, but with so few adornments that Lee had to hold his nerve writing it, particularly when it came to Fan. "All the things that we have now are about revealing private moments of consciousness, and sharing them with each other. A constantly defining and redefining of each other and ourselves by all this stuff. And it's exhausting. And the thought experiment for me artistically was: could I write a story in which the main character had none of that stuff? But you'd still feel something for her, and care about her, if you didn't really know her. And what was that? That seems to me elementally what a hero is. It's not because we know them so well. They're magnetic. It's a different kind of charisma."

The fascinating thing about On Such a Full Sea is that, for all its adventure narrative, it is underpinned by a solid and shrewd reading of present-day American economics. It is a novel of its time, caught up in recessionary politics and what happens when social mobility, except for a lucky few, effectively grinds to a halt.

Lee grew up in Westchester, a posh suburb of New York that, in the book, is represented by the "Charter villages", the highly secure zones where rich people live and work, unless they lose their place in the pecking order and are chucked out into the wilderness. Lee's parents, a psychiatrist and a home-maker, were immigrants from Korea, which gave him, he says, some perspective on the privilege of his upbringing.

"Even though I went to Exeter and Yale, and I enjoyed all the trappings of those places, I think at the same time – and maybe it's because I'm an immigrant kid and not white – there was always this other consciousness; that is, I was conscious of everything that was going on. And I was observing. Some people just ARE, because the temperature of the water is exactly the temperature of their body." He laughs. "But my temperature is always off, a little bit. And I have to note it. And I always did, from a very young age. I don't know if that's my character or upbringing or both."

Like the residents of B-Mor, who find themselves making small, meaningless gestures of revolt, as a child Lee could never quite stop himself from upending things. "I felt something creative. I remember when I was in art classes I hated following the assignments. And I would get in trouble for doing something totally different, or taking it in a weird direction. I didn't think it through or anything, it was just this impulse. I felt like I was never going to quite fit in terms of following rules. And I'd been taught my whole life to follow rules. And to a great extent did. But the last 5% I always wanted to ruin everything."

Lee felt under pressure from his parents to get a conventional job after college, and so, against his better judgment, went into finance. Exactly a year to the day after he joined a Wall Street firm as an analyst, he quit. "My parents – my mother particularly – were very focused on our succeeding. I loved my parents, and was very grateful to them for everything, and I didn't want to disappoint them. But I knew it wasn't going to be my passion. I quite enjoyed making some money. But I could tell that others had a passion for it that I would only be straining to manufacture … So I got out when I was 22. I thought, if I fail at writing, I can go back at 27."

He had some money saved, and his parents helped in the last few years of that five-year test period. Lee also went to graduate school, and by the end of the five years was getting somewhere with his first novel, Native Speaker, which won the PEN/Hemingway award. By his fourth, The Surrendered, which draws on his father's war-time experience in Korea, he was a Pulitzer finalist.

In On Such a Full Sea, his fifth novel, Lee draws on some of what struck him during that brief period in Wall Street, particularly pertinent now in light of debates about the 1%. The question, he asks, is what does that kind of stratified privilege do to a person's interior life, when the alternatives are so utterly miserable? When he was creating the Charter villages in the novel, he had in mind Singapore, where everything is shiny and bright, and fanatically orderly. To me, it sounded more like contemporary Manhattan in the age of the hedge-fund manager.

"So much of this book is the narrator talking about freedom, but it's not political freedom. It's freedom of imagination. Freedom of the soul, somehow. And all these people are trapped; the counties people are trapped in chaos and neglect. The B-Mors are trapped in their regulations and need to get along. But the Charters, in my view, are trapped most. They're imprisoned by all the things that they feel are safeguarding them. From death. And completely wasting their time."

He has a keen satirical eye for modern fads. Of the inhabitants of Seneca, one of the Charter villages, he writes: "They looked fit enough and not one of them could be termed fat, but it seemed to Fan they were maintaining themselves in a stressful way, such as not quite eating enough, their dogged faces a bit too drawn, even slightly desiccated."

The most savage event in the story does not take place in the unpoliced zones, but rather within Seneca, where people have the most to lose. Lee says, "The Charters are not stupid. They're educated. They're all like us. Good health care. Means. But because of their entrenchment and cloistering, they've ceased to think that there's any reason or possibility of looking outwards. It's not even lack of empathy. It's almost...lack of vision. The possibility of even seeing."

The question is what does it do to introspection? "Yes. The question is what's left, after that? Fetish. Obsession. Some sort of pathological interest in staying alive. And a certain kind of degeneracy that's not creative. I'm all for degeneracy if it's creative. But it's a living death."

It comes down, as in all things, to perspective. Lee's defection from finance was something his parents might have worried about more, if it hadn't been for the timing. "My mother was dying at the same time, so I think that was obviously a bigger issue than my career. In a way, it also put things in perspective for all of us. I think my parents recognised that I'd always wanted to be a writer, and so they didn't think that this was some idle, faddish wish on my part."

After his mother's death, he wrote a very touching piece for the New Yorker recounting her last days and the weeks and months afterwards, when he cooked her favourite Korean recipes but they always came out wrong. While she was dying, she had raised a worry that shocked him at the time. She wondered if sending him to boarding school had been the wrong thing to do, taking those years away from them both. "So why did you?" he asks. She says, "Because I didn't know I was going to die."

There is a lot of brutality and deadened feeling in On Such a Full Sea, but it ends, finally, on notes of love. Lee is tender on this subject. "If she possessed a genius," he writes of Fan, "it was a capacity for understanding and trusting the improvisational nature of her will." The role of the individual only has meaning in relation to the whole, a point Lee makes via the comical image of Fan's outsized boyfriend standing alongside her diminutive figure. They should look ridiculous together, Lee writes, but, "he sized her, if this can be said, the way a planet does its moon, the two bodies perhaps much differing within their scale but nothing like they would be once adrift in the profound vastness of space." Throughout her adventures and near-death experiences, the point at which Fan feels most adrift is an ordinary moment of disconnect: "the feeling can come from something as unpitched as this: standing among a roomful of strangers in a house far away".

It was Lee's own daughters who partly inspired him to write the book; he has a 13- and a 16-year-old, and he wanted to write something they might potentially enjoy, or create a heroine they might identify with. The book has, half tongue in cheek, been compared to The Hunger Games, which makes him laugh. "It's because there's a young girl and she leaves. It's fine! Those people will be disappointed." Then he quickly adds, before his publishers can shout at him: "But I'm hoping even those readers might magically think, 'Hang on, I like Fan, and I don't quite know why.' And that's OK. That'd be great."

Perhaps, too, he would like to show his daughters that it's not a bad idea, occasionally, to quit passively consuming and get up and do something. "Fan seems to be the only one who is discovering by doing. And that's what everyone in the book, all the people who meet her, whether they want to use her or not, they all see that little thing in her, that is inspiring. They see that she's free. She's free of all those other attachments and deformations that have happened to them because of their circumstance. And that somehow she's able to, just by the act of moving around, transcend those things. And it's moving that has kept her still."

Without quite planning to, Lee has provided an antidote to the background yapping we all suffer these days. "Almost all of western literature is about talk," he says. "There's this great line in Beckett: keep talking, you're winning. And somehow I wanted to subvert that; the need to constantly express and put your verbal and psychological stamp on everything." He smiles. "You don't always have to talk."

Emma Brockes

At Night We Walk in Circles by Daniel Alarcón – review

Posted: 18 Jan 2014 12:30 AM PST

An engaging story of love and imprisonment in Peru is let down by its narrator

Donna Tartt recently described the process of writing a novel as like "painting a large mural with a brush the size of an eyelash". My own favourite is that it's like trying to fill a swimming pool with a syringe. Or, in a different mood, that writing a novel is like trying to hold a vast and intricate maths equation in your head that seeks to represent reality and through which you are trying to lead people without them ever getting wind that said equation is, in fact, impossible to solve or that, actually, it might not represent reality at all. Hold that last thought a moment and we'll come back to it.

Daniel Alarcón has been blessed and cursed by appearing on one of those literary lists – the New Yorker's "20 under-40 young writers who capture the inventiveness and vitality of contemporary American fiction". Though he moved to America when he was very young, Alarcón was born in Peru, which is where At Night We Walk in Circles is set.

The novel tells two main stories. First, there is Nelson, a young actor living in Lima. His ex-girlfriend, Ixta, is now with an intensely pedestrian man called Mindo – but she and Nelson have been conducting an affair, which she (mostly) wants to end: "You don't stop loving someone like Nelson … You just give up."

Meanwhile, Nelson successfully auditions for a part in a three-man show called The Idiot President written by and starring Henry Nuñez, the leader of the seditious theatre troupe, Diciembre, whose notoriety was most potent during the "anxious years" of the civil war when Nelson was a boy. The play tours the country, but all the while Ixta haunts the hidden chambers of Nelson's heart. Eventually, he calls her to say that he loves her and that they cannot live apart. But she tells him to forget it – she's pregnant. And the baby, she is (mostly) sure, is Mindo's.

The second story is that of Henry Nuñez, who was arrested in 1986 at the height of his fame on false charges and thrown into Collectors, the "country's most infamous prison". Though previously heterosexual and promiscuous, during his months in prison Nuñez shares a room with young Rogelio, who becomes his friend, his protector, his lover. It is in the (long since dead) Rogelio's home town that the course of the plot deepens and darkens.

Now back to that equation. Alarcón chooses to tell these stories from the point of view of a magazine journalist who is piecing together information from interviews and diaries. On one side of the novel-writing equation, what this gives him is freedom to roam between characters and – most of all – the great benefits of suspense and foreshadowing. Since the journalist is "reporting" from the end of the story, he is able to make us aware that something bad has happened to Nelson and that if only we stay with his account, all will be revealed. Great. This works well.

But, in my view, the gain on one side of the equation leads to a big loss on the other: specifically, the loss of immediacy, intimacy and involvement. Why? Because what this device means in practice is that we are continually being reminded of the journalist during the story and within the scenes themselves. There are a lot of phrases along the lines of "he later told me" or "in the third hour of my second interview with Monica"' or "The sun in Nelson's eyes was like stage lights, I imagine." And this has the distracting effect of taking us out of the moment. I kept writing notes such as "needs to step forward directly into the action or get out of the shot", or "feels like through frosted glass".

This storytelling technique works best if the narrator either melts away or turns out to have a purpose or involvement crucial to the action. But Alarcón takes a halfway stance that serves mainly to require (and remind) us to experience the novel at a remove.

Conversely, the best passages seemed to me to be the ones where Alarcón temporarily disappears his journalist from the narrative equation altogether, raising the deeper question: why put him there in the first place?

Alarcón is a serious, talented, charming and often beautiful writer. I have travelled in Peru and I was struck by how precisely he reminded me of the country. He is also engagingly human, playful and observant. On Nelson's decision to go on the tour: "He wanted to be a better person; and if that were not possible, at least to seem like one." Alarcón will write a great novel, I'm sure, but this is not yet the one.

• Edward Docx's The Devil's Garden is published by Picador.

Edward Docx

Experience: I caught a falling baby

Posted: 18 Jan 2014 12:00 AM PST

'The reality of saving someone's life is intense. I play it over in my head so many times'

I've always known that I'm very quick with my hands. If someone throws something, I catch it almost before I'm aware it has been thrown. It probably helps that I spent years at baseball stadiums as a child – my dad was manager of the New York Yankees. We didn't practise together, but I guess my reflexes must have naturally developed. When I was young, I had no idea how useful this skill would become.

Two summers ago, in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, babies were on my mind. I was going to visit a friend with her newborn and was on my way to a toy store to buy a gift. I'd once lived in the neighbourhood and on a whim I decided to head back to my old haunt, a cupcake shop, for a coffee. Sitting alone at a table outside with my drink, I was approached by a typical Brooklyn older man, who in a calm and very matter-of-fact way told me to call 911, because there was a baby on a fire escape.

I jumped up to see where the baby was. I was so surprised to see it, wearing a little onesie and lying on the fire escape railings between the second and third storeys. He was lying like a cat, with his tummy on the hand rail, arms and legs tucked in. He was resting there, looking around nonchalantly. I was nervous, but the baby boy became my only priority.

As I was on the phone to the emergency services, I made eye contact with the child, keeping him calm, telling him to stay there. Some people were going up the stairs to find the parents, who were apparently sleeping through the whole drama.

I just wanted the child, who I later found out was called Dillon, to feel safe – and he didn't seem upset. He was comfortable up there, just looking down at me for nearly 10 minutes. I hoped he'd stay there until somebody could rescue him.

Apparently he had slipped through pieces of cardboard placed next to an air-conditioning unit in the window, and without bars to protect him he'd crawled out and up the fire escape towards the next storey. He was clearly a physically capable child, but he was only 16 months old. For him to even climb up and balance in that position was incredible.

Then he slipped. Instinctively, he grabbed on as he fell, so he was gripping the railing, hanging by his arms. I knew he couldn't hold on, 25 feet above the street, for long. I sensed people had gathered behind, but my attention was purely focused on my intention to catch the baby. I made sure I was positioned to save him.

I told 911 he was falling and within a minute Dillon had. As he tumbled, he hit a protruding plastic sign for a yoga shop. There were shocked gasps as everyone heard his face knock the sign and he started to cry.

I didn't move to catch him; I was in exactly the right spot. He just fell into my outstretched arms. He felt weightless. It was effortless. It felt like a basic and simple human response. Somehow I even managed to keep hold of my phone. I was in shock, and before I knew it a man stepped forward and took him from me; he worked in the local hardware store. There was blood on Dillon's face, but it turned out it was only his lip that had been cut. He stopped crying pretty quickly – he seemed very resilient. I think he should take all the credit.

The moments after he fell were overwhelming. People were being very kind and hugging me, telling me I was an angel. Dillon's parents had been woken by the commotion and his mother came down and thanked me, and his dad hugged me. I had been holding everything together, but when I caught the subway I finally let go and burst into tears. I was then able to think about my own feelings that I'd put aside and considered what would have happened if I hadn't caught him. That is when I really felt scared.

The reality of saving someone's life is intense. I play it over in my head so many times, I think it has changed me. I am calm and more at ease with things. I study mindfulness, and I see now that if we let intuition lead us, we can deal with anything. I think I was meant to be there.

• As told to Sarah Smith

Do you have an experience to share? Email experience@theguardian.com

Sarah Smith

My Tanzanian family: a childhood dream come true

Posted: 17 Jan 2014 11:30 PM PST

Amy Hathaway and her husband Ben have adopted five children and set up an orphanage in Africa. Her unusual route to motherhood began at the age of six, when she saw the effects of the 1984 Ethiopian famine on TV

On their first date, Amy Hathaway told her future husband, Ben, that she wanted to adopt five children and move to Africa. And it didn't scare him off. Amy always knew she would adopt. It wasn't a question of necessity – she could have children naturally – but one of choice, one she made at an early age.

The seeds were planted when she was six and saw the 1984 Ethiopian famine on television. "I was horrified at the emaciated babies. I told my mother then I would help children like that when I grew up," she says.

So, when Amy first held her son Barnabas for the first time in Tanzania, it was the fulfilment of a childhood dream. "Since I'd given up dolls I had wanted to become a mother," she recalls. "Staring down at him, I knew I loved him more than anything in my whole life."

Amy's journey to motherhood is no ordinary story. Barnabas, now 12, was adopted when he was two.

Amy, 34, and her husband Ben, 35, have four other adopted Tanzanian children: Tia, 10; Charlie, eight; Molly, seven and Leila, six.

They have no plans to add to their family biologically. "I'm often asked if I'd like 'a child of my own' but that makes me laugh. Biology means nothing," she says.

"People assume adoption is the last resort – just for if you are infertile. I had always wanted to be a mother, and yet saw hundreds of babies without one. It was simple maths. A child with no family and a family with no child can make a happy unit. It was never a last resort but my life plan."

Amy spent a year volunteering at a Zimbabwean orphanage before university and also did stints at Romanian orphanages. She trained as a teacher so she could work in Africa permanently. "I am not religious but Africa felt like my calling. I knew that was where my life was headed," she says. Then Amy met Ben at university in Durham and told him about her ambitions. "As our relationship grew, it was accepted that this was how we would have children," she says.

By 2002, the couple had married and were living in Mwanza in Tanzania. Amy worked as a teacher at the Isamilo International School and Ben in IT. Each night the couple travelled across town to visit an orphanage. "There were over 100 babies lying in cots. All of them wanted their turn to play and have cuddles."

Amy had contacted Tanzania's social welfare department about adoption but the response was muted. "They said they had no white children for us. They implied we only wanted a black child until we got a white one and then we would discard it. We insisted that this was our family choice."

Undeterred, Amy and Ben visited social welfare every day for three months until the authorities relented. A nine-month administrative process followed that included interviewing their families in the UK. "Finally we were told to choose a child from the orphanage where we volunteered. It was an impossible decision."

In the end, the orphanage directors chose Barnabas and, in September 2003, the couple took him home.

"I had spent months poring over books and expected a 'growing to love you' time, but the connection between us all was instant," says Amy.

Amy and Ben decided to apply for a second child almost immediately. "We knew the process was lengthy but in July 2004 we were offered Tia, who was six months. We met her when we flew across Tanzania to Arusha to collect her. She was easy to fall in love with."

Around that time, Amy went to visit a friend in hospital and what she saw changed her life yet again. "I went to the nurse's office for a clean bed sheet. In a metal cot, among the sheets, lay four babies. They could have ranged from one month to two years – I could not tell as they were literally skin and bones." The nurse told Amy the babies had Aids and because of that no one was caring for them. The next day Amy visited the social welfare office.

"The images of the Ethiopian famine had come rushing back and I knew I had to do something. When I told the head social worker, she asked if I wanted them. I couldn't take four babies to our small house but from that conversation our orphanage, Forever Angels, was born."

It took two years for Ben and Amy to gather the finance, people and property to set up the orphanage. In April 2006 they moved into a house on site. Since that day the home has cared for 223 children in the centre and over 200 outreach cases. About three quarters of the children are eventually reunited with their biological families.

"Their mothers have generally died but other relatives take them once they are strong and weaned. Formula is too expensive for many so without Forever Angels the babies would die. The other 25% of children are, hopefully, adopted. We couldn't save those four original babies but others have been helped because of them."

As Forever Angels grew, so did Amy and Ben's family. First there was Molly, one of the orphanage children. "She was six months old and so ill with malnutrition and neglect that I took her into our house to give her undivided attention. As I brought her through the door Barnabas and Tia's eyes lit up. I knew then she was never going back.

"We still had to go through all the proper channels to adopt the children and they were all legally adopted at the Tanzanian High Court. Adopting Barnabas was hardest as we had to get approval from the UK as well – but for the other four children, we could use the same approval so it was easier."

Next came Leila. She arrived at Forever Angels at seven weeks old, weighing just 2lb 8oz. Within a week, there was a chicken pox outbreak. "She was so vulnerable; she would not have survived so I took her to my house."

For weeks Amy woke every two hours during the night to feed Leila through a tube. "Ben and I knew in our hearts she was never going back."

Charlie, their fifth child, had been adopted unsuccessfully by a British couple. "They were just not prepared for the demands of a five-year-old child and terminated the adoption early on, before strong attachments were made."

He was returned to Forever Angels.

"All of my children knew Charlie and when I told them he would be taken to another orphanage as he was too old, they immediately agreed we should adopt him." This time social welfare gave their approval by telephone they had become so used to the Hathaways.

Amy says her children are used to sharing her with Forever Angels. She often works 20-hour days. "I might be at the police station dealing with an abuse case; visiting a child reunited with relatives; at an HIV clinic, up to my eyes in paperwork or just playing with the children."

Some days she'll be driving madly around town trying to source baby milk. And sometimes there are funerals for babies that lose the fight. Thankfully she has a childminder, Pauline, to help with her own family.

In June, Amy and Ben are returning to England. Leila is deaf and they feel she will benefit from specialist medical care and schooling. Amy has trained managers and will continue to fundraise from here. "It breaks my heart to leave. I have no idea how to be a mum in the UK and it feels daunting. The children will always be a part of Tanzania. We often talk about their 'tummy mummies'. They gave their children an amazing chance. I owe these five women for ever for giving me the most precious gift imaginable."

www.foreverangels.org

Taliban suicide attackers kill dozens at Kabul restaurant

Posted: 17 Jan 2014 10:10 PM PST

Briton, local IMF chief and UN staff among the dead after armed militants burst into restaurant in Afghan capital's fortified zone

The head of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) in Afghanistan and four UN staff were among as many as 21 people killed when a Taliban suicide squad burst into a Kabul restaurant on Friday evening and gunned down the diners.

One Briton was among the dead, the Foreign Office confirmed late on Friday, in what was an unusually violent attack at the heart of the heavily fortified diplomatic quarter.

The Canadian foreign affairs minister, John Baird, said two Canadians died in the attack. Deputy Afghan interior minister Ayoub Salangai said in a tweet that the dead included four women.

The IMF said their country head, Lebanese citizen Wabel Abdallah, had worked in Afghanistan since 2008.

"This is tragic news, and we at the fund are all devastated," managing director Christine Lagarde said in a statement. "Our hearts go out to Wabel's family and friends, as well as the other victims of this attack."

Targeting civilians in a lightly protected restaurant was a clear statement of insurgent intent in a year critical for Afghanistan's future.

Mohammad Zahir, the Kabul police chief, said there were both foreigners and Afghans among the dead and wounded, but declined to give further information.

A Taliban spokesman said on Twitter that the attack was revenge for an airstrike that had killed civilians in Parwan province this week.

The UN secretary-general, Ban Ki-moon, condemned the attack "in the strongest terms", saying "such targeted attacks against civilians are completely unacceptable and are in flagrant breach of international humanitarian law", UN deputy spokesman Farhan Haq said.

In Washington, State Department spokeswoman Jen Psaki said the US condemns "this despicable act of terrorism in the strongest possible terms". She said all US embassy personnel were accounted for.

A presidential election in April will select Afghanistan's first new ruler in more than a decade, and foreign combat troops finish their mission, leaving the Afghan police and army to battle the Taliban alone.

Friday's attack began with a bomb blast that shook the Wazir Akbar Khan neighbourhood shortly after 7pm, as one attacker apparently detonated his explosives at the restaurant's front gate.

It was followed by more than two hours of sporadic gunfire, as Afghan commandos besieged two other attackers who reportedly stole through a back entrance and holed up inside.

"Damn! Never experienced so close an attack. Shootings and screams of horror in the street. Broken windows in our house!" one Afghan who lives near the restaurant posted on Facebook.

The Taliban rapidly claimed responsibility, saying they had targeted "foreign invaders", although the Nato mission said there were no soldiers at the restaurant when the assault began.

The restaurant's popular owner, Lebanese citizen Kamal Hamade, was among the dead. "VV sad news Kabul. Our dear Lebanese friend Kamal, the kindest of hosts, was killed in Taliban attack," BBC journalist Lyse Doucet said on Twitter.

The UN boss in Afghanistan, Jan Kubis, condemned the attack and targeting of civilians. "This violence is unacceptable and must stop immediately," he said in a statement.

It was the deadliest day for the UN in Afghanistan in nearly three years.

In April 2011 a rioting mob overran a compound in northern Mazar-e-Sharif city, killing three UN workers and four Nepalese security guards. Eighteen months earlier, in autumn 2009, five UN workers were killed in Kabul when gunmen burst into a guesthouse for the organisation's staff.

The deaths had a far-reaching impact on how the UN and many other international organisations worked in the Afghan capital.

A single suicide attacker killed an Afghan family, including a human rights chief, with a bomb at a nearby supermarket three years ago, but security has been tightened since then at most places frequented by the Afghan elite or foreigners.

The area is packed with the homes of the Afghan elite, guesthouses for foreigners and offices of international organisations. Many streets are patrolled by police guards, but a well-prepared group could weave through back streets and avoid them.

Afghan families missing loved ones gathered outside the restaurant hoping for news. Ajmal was looking for his father Mohammad Ali, an employee of a telecoms firm.

"My dad called home this afternoon and said 'you guys have your dinner without me, because I am going to a restaurant with my friends'," said Ajmal. He saw a friend of his father carried out injured. "His friend was seriously wounded in his leg. My father has disappeared and we are very worried."

Mokhtar Amiri

Emma Graham-Harrison

Guardian Australia at Carriageworks – Sydney festival 2014

Posted: 17 Jan 2014 09:31 PM PST

Anna Kucera captured the festival spirit at Carriageworks, as Guardian Australia decamped to the arts centre for its About an Hour festival of opera, theatre, dance and visual arts

Chinese rock star Cui Jian quits new year show over Tiananmen song

Posted: 17 Jan 2014 09:11 PM PST

China Central Television refused permission for Cui to sing Nothing to My Name, unofficial anthem of 1989 protesters

Sydney Festival 2014: Scotch and Soda - video

Posted: 17 Jan 2014 08:06 PM PST

Scotch and Soda is proving to be a Sydney festival hit – with audiences and critics warming to this rowdy, late-night circus show. Performer Chelsea McGuffin tells us about this unique and energetic performance which fuses together infectious tunes from The Crusty Suitcase Band and bawdy theatrics from Company 2.

Indonesian president says he felt betrayed by Tony Abbott over spying

Posted: 17 Jan 2014 06:47 PM PST

In a new book, Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono says he initially wanted a mild response, but changed tack after Abbott refused to apologise

Aid groups accuse Coalition of broken promise after it announces new cuts

Posted: 17 Jan 2014 05:27 PM PST

All funding for environment programs to end, as Coalition focuses aid on countries it needs to support its asylum policy

Lenore Taylor

Black Diggers: challenging the Anzac narrative – video

Posted: 17 Jan 2014 05:03 PM PST

The creators of a new play portraying the experiences of indigenous men in the first world war sit down with Guardian Australia before taking on the Sydney festival. Director Wesley Enoch and writer Tom Wright tell Van Badham what drove them to tell the oft-forgotten story of men who signed up to fight for the aims of the British Empire, only to remain second-class citizens in their own land

Bill Code

Van Badham

Government must be upfront about garden city plans, says Nick Clegg

Posted: 17 Jan 2014 04:33 PM PST

Deputy prime minister says green belt is being eaten away and calls for planned cities rather than piecemeal developments

The government must be "honest and upfront" about plans to build new garden cities in south-east England, Nick Clegg has said. The deputy prime minister acknowledged that the green belt was being "eaten away" by urban sprawl and that there was a need for the new planned cities rather than relying on further piecemeal developments.

He insisted that a plan for the new cities would be published and said there was "no point in hiding" from the fact that they were needed in the south-east.

The Daily Telegraph reported that a draft proposal suggests two new settlements in Yalding, Kent and Gerrards Cross, Buckinghamshire.

In an article for the newspaper, Clegg wrote: "We cannot make the mistakes of past governments and sit on our hands while a whole generation of people are squeezed out of the housing market. It is our duty to change the story.

"We must bring decades of indecision and stagnant political will to an end. That is why I am a strong advocate of garden cities, where there is clear local support and private sector appetite. In 2011, our housing strategy committed us to publishing a prospectus for new garden cities and that is exactly what we'll do."

The current situation had led to "bloated" towns and cities "being forced to expand further bit by bit, and the green belt is being eaten away".

But Clegg claimed garden cities could protect the countryside, and it would be possible to build them without concreting over the green belt, national parks or areas of outstanding natural beauty.

Although he stopped short of identifying specific sites earmarked for development, he said: "We must also be honest and upfront about where they will be. There's no point in hiding from this: there is an arc around the south-east of England where demand is past breaking point.

"The current situation is bad for the economy and places a massive strain on vital services. Where there is more work and more demand, we should bite the bullet and create garden towns and garden cities."

The Liberal Democrats have previously claimed that the Conservatives are suppressing the report, and party president Tim Farron accused the Tories of a "nimby attitude towards garden cities", which are likely to be in their political heartlands.

Clegg wrote: "I believe that if we put aside partisan politics and think collectively about the housing needs of the next generation, we could set Britain on track for a major wave of new development, new jobs and new hope."

Huge Grampians bushfire still threatens in uncertain conditions

Posted: 17 Jan 2014 04:16 PM PST

Grampians fire was so intense it created its own weather, while warnings in South Australia are downgraded

The Very Near Future – review

Posted: 17 Jan 2014 03:23 PM PST

Alex Davies' The Very Near Future mimics the misdirection of magic and cinema through a 'mixed reality' installation

Andrew Frost

Shale gas extraction 'will transform Britain'

Posted: 17 Jan 2014 02:30 PM PST

Exploitation of shale gas and oil may reduce energy prices, but at potential cost to landscape, warns US energy secretary

The UK's push for shale gas will result in unavoidable changes to the countryside, the US energy secretary has warned. Ernest Moniz, who took over as energy chief for President Obama's second term, has overseen arguably the biggest changes to US energy production since the discovery of oil.

He said the exploitation of shale gas and oil on a vast scale in the US had been "transformative", vastly reducing energy prices, boosting industry and lowering carbon emissions as more electricity production shifted from coal to gas. But he warned that any boost to the economy would come at a serious cost, as "you can't avoid" the fact that extracting gas on such a scale involves a massive industrial effort.

"The one thing it's very hard to change is that this is a big industrial enterprise. That's one thing you can't avoid. That is something communities and governments have to cope with."

UK ministers have sought to play down the environmental impacts of shale, which could involve the drilling of tens of thousands of wells throughout the countryside in order to tap the gas initially and then keep it flowing over years.

Moniz said the UK could engineer a similar revolution to that of the US, given the sizeable shale resources that geologists believe exist in the country, if they can be recovered economically. "There is a big potential, a big resource," he said.

He said that the US had experienced problems with air quality and pollution, but said this was mainly because of poor practices, such as "bad well completion, and issues with well casing". Using industry best practices could minimise this impact.

Although shale has helped to cut emissions in the US in recent years – they rose again last year, perhaps partly in response to a bounce in gas prices that has kept some coal-fired power stations burning – that effect has not been replicated globally. That is because unburnt coal no longer required in the US has flooded world markets, resulting in a substantially increased use of the high-carbon fuel.

In its Global Energy Outlook, published on Wednesday, BP predicted that global emissions would rise by 29% in the next two decades, despite a projected massive increase in the amount of shale gas produced, and the potential for switching from coal to gas.

Moniz acknowledged that natural gas could be seen as "part of the solution, and part of the problem". He said, however, that it could be positive in helping to bring down US emissions owing to the switch from coal, when taken alongside President Obama's push for higher fuel efficiency for vehicles.

Joss Garman, deputy political director of Greenpeace, said the UK and the US should be seeking to invest more in renewable energy as a way of cutting emissions and avoiding dangerous climate change. He told the Guardian: "By making oil and gas production so central to America's economic plans, President Obama's team are strengthening the very vested interests that have made it so difficult for successive Democrat administrations to achieve action on climate change over the last few decades.

"It's now plain dangerous as well as unnecessary for the US and the rest of the world to keep drilling the last drops of dirty fuels, whether those fossil fuels are under the Arctic ice, or beneath the fields of the English countryside. Clean, affordable energy sources exist and should be used instead."

Moniz also called for the US to put much more effort into adapting to the effects of climate change. He cited Hurricane Sandy as an example of the costly damage that can be inflicted. "We have spent more on recovery than on preparation [for the effects of climate change]," he said.

A spokesman for the Department of Energy and Climate Change said: "The government has been clear that wherever shale gas fracking is conducted it must be done in a safe and environmentally sound way. There are regulations in place to ensure on-site safety, prevent water contamination, air pollution and mitigate seismic activity.

"The Environment Agency will assess the permitting requirements for each proposal on a site-by-site basis, considering the design of the operations and its proximity to ground and surface waters. The government believes that shale gas has the potential to provide the UK with greater energy security, growth and jobs."

Fiona Harvey

At least 13 dead in attack on Kabul restaurant

Posted: 17 Jan 2014 02:21 PM PST

Foreign Office confirms one Briton was among dead at Lebanese restaurant in fortified area of Afghan capital

At least 13 people, including one Briton, have been killed in Kabul after three Taliban suicide bombers attacked a Lebanese restaurant popular with foreigners and wealthy Afghans in the heart of the capital's heavily fortified diplomatic quarter.

The UN said that four of its civilian personnel who may have been near the scene of the attack still remain unaccounted for. The UN is making efforts to clarify the status of its personnel.

The Foreign Office in London confirmed that a British citizen had been killed in the attack.

The attack on a relatively unprotected restaurant was a clear statement of insurgent intent in a year critical for Afghanistan's future.

A presidential election in April will select the country's first new ruler in more than a decade, and foreign combat troops finish their mission, leaving the Afghan police and army to battle the Taliban alone.

Friday's attack began with a bomb blast that shook the Wazir Akbar Khan neighbourhood shortly after 7pm, as one attacker apparently detonated his explosives at the restaurant's fortified gate. It was followed by more than two hours of sporadic gunfire, as Afghan commandos besieged two other attackers apparently holed up inside. Mohammad Zahir, the Kabul police chief, said at least 13 people had died, with several others injured. Afghans and foreigners were among the dead, he said, but declined to give further information. "Damn! Never experienced so close an attack. Shootings and screams of horror in the street. Broken windows in our house!" one Afghan who lives near the restaurant posted on Facebook.

The Taliban claimed responsibility, saying they had targeted "foreign invaders" and there were Germans among the dead.

Although there are regular attacks on targets in the Afghan capital, it is rare for would-be attackers to make it through rings of security around the city, elude an extensive intelligence network, and strike with such deadly force at a civilian target around the heavily fortified "green zone" that houses Nato and US embassy headquarters. A single suicide attacker killed an Afghan family, including a human rights chief, with a bomb at a nearby supermarket three years ago, but security has been tightened since then at most places frequented by the Afghan elite or foreigners.

If the UN staff are confirmed as victims of the trio of attackers, it would make it the deadliest day for the United Nations in Afghanistan in nearly three years. In April 2011 a rioting mob overran a compound in northern Mazar-e-Sharif city, killing three UN workers and four Nepalese security guards. Eighteen months earlier in autumn 2009 five UN workers were killed in Kabul when gunmen burst into a guesthouse for the organisation's staff. Two Afghan security guards and an Afghan civilian were also killed in that assault, shortly before the second round of the last presidential election. The deaths had a far-reaching impact on how the United Nations and many other international organisations worked in the Afghan capital.

Friday's target, the Taverna restaurant, was a low-key but well-loved venue usually busy on a Friday, the Afghan weekend. It had guards with AK-47s and an air-lock entry system of steel gates, but those precautions would have been little match for a heavily-armed suicide squad.The area is packed with the homes of the Afghan elite, guesthouses for foreigners and offices of international organisations. Many streets are patrolled by police guards, but a well-prepared group could thread its way through back streets and avoid them.

An anxious man waiting outside said his father was missing and a friend had been taken to hospital with serious injuries.

"My dad called home this afternoon and said 'you guys have your dinner without me, because I am going to a restaurant with my friends'. We heard on the news about the explosion, and came to the site, and I saw my father's friend being carried out by the police," said Ajmal, who said his father, Mohammad Ali, worked for a telecoms firm.

"His friend was seriously wounded in his leg. My father has disappeared and we are very worried."

Mokhtar Amiri

Obama announces new limits on NSA surveillance programs – live reaction

Posted: 17 Jan 2014 02:16 PM PST

Follow live updates of President Obama's speech on NSA reforms taken from surveillance review panel

Tom McCarthy

Boy in custody after two students shot at Philadelphia high school

Posted: 17 Jan 2014 01:58 PM PST

Gun yet to be recovered as police say sudents who were shot suffered non-life-threatening injuries

Ukrainian president approves strict anti-protest laws

Posted: 17 Jan 2014 01:54 PM PST

Viktor Yanukovych signs bills passed by parliament that western governments have called anti-democratic and wrong

The Ukrainian president Viktor Yanukovich has signed into force a set of tough new laws that ban virtually all forms of anti-government protests despite an outcry from western governments that have criticised them as anti-democratic.

The presidential website listed the laws, which were rushed through parliament by Yanukovich's supporters on Thursday.

Yanukovich triggered major pro-Europe rallies in the former Soviet republic when he walked away from signing a landmark free trade deal with the European Union in late November in favour of closer economic ties with Russia, Ukraine's Soviet-era overlord.

These rallies rapidly spiralled into mass anti-government protests that brought hundreds of thousands on to the streets of the capital, Kiev.

Several hundred protesters are still camped out in the main Independence Square and on the city's main thoroughfare. Several hundred others are camped out 300 metres away in City Hall.

Heavy-handed action by riot police to break up the protests in December failed and brought condemnation from the United States and Europe.

The new laws ban any unauthorised installation of tents, stages or amplifiers which have all been features of the protests that play out day and night on Kiev's Independence Square. People and organisations who provide facilities or equipment for such meetings will also be liable to a fine or detention. The laws foresee prison terms of up to 15 years for "mass violation" of public order.

Apart from targeting public protests, the laws also are similar to Russia's on registration of foreign non-governmental organisations (NGOs), categorising them as "foreign agents" if they are funded from abroad.

Yanukovich's decision to speedily sign the laws seemed certain to add tension to a new rally in Kiev which the opposition has called for Sunday.

Though the protests do not appear to have threatened Yanukovich's grip on power, an indication of tensions within his close entourage came with an announcement that he had sacked his powerful chief-of-staff, Serhiy Lyovochkin.

The president's office gave no reason for the move.

Lyovochkin was rumoured to have wanted to step down shortly after riot police dispersed student protesters with stun grenades and batons on 30 November, a move which brought tens of thousands out on to the streets the next day. But these reports were subsequently officially denied.

Ukraine's foreign minister Leonid Kozhara on Friday rebuked the west over its criticism and said it was "considered in Kiev as meddling in the internal affairs of our state", according to a ministry statement.

Kozhara, it said, made his comments during a meeting with the EU's ambassador to Kiev, Jan Tombinski, and US ambassador Geoffrey Pyatt.

"I am deeply concerned by the events in Kyiv (Kiev)," Catherine Ashton, the EU foreign policy chief, said in a statement, adding that the legislation was "restricting the Ukrainian citizens' fundamental rights".

The German foreign minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier said the course taken by Yanukovich was "a dead end ... Repression is no answer to a contentious, political debate".

In Washington, US Secretary of State John Kerry said the move was disturbing and wrong.

"The steps that were taken yesterday are anti-democratic, they're wrong, they are taking from the people of Ukraine their choice and their opportunity for the future," Kerry told reporters after a meeting with his Greek counterpart.

"We will continue to stay focused on this issue, but this kind of anti-democratic maneuvre is extremely disturbing and should be a concern to every nation that wants to see the people of Ukraine be able to not only express their wish but see it executed through the political process," he added.

Indian minister's wife found dead after affair claims

Posted: 17 Jan 2014 01:49 PM PST

Police investigate cause of Sunanda Pushkar's death after tweets accused husband Shashi Tharoor of having an affair

The wife of an Indian government minister has been found dead in a hotel room in Delhi after her husband was accused of having an affair with a Pakistani journalist.

Police are investigating the cause of Sunanda Pushkar's death. Tweets allegedly posted by Pushkar this week accused the journalist of being a spy and of having an affair with Pushkar's husband, Shashi Tharoor, a junior human resources minister.

On Thursday Tharoor and Pushkar issued a joint statement saying they were happily married and the tweets were unauthorised. In interviews with Indian television channels the journalist denied she was having an affair with Tharoor and said she had met him in the past for interviews.

Abhinav Kumar, a minister's aide, told reporters on Friday that Tharoor and his wife had moved into the hotel on Thursday as some painting work was being done at their home. The minister thought his wife was sleeping when he returned to their suite on Friday night after attending a meeting of his governing Congress party. But she was found dead, he said.

Pushkar on Thursday gave a series of rambling interviews to Indian TV stations in which she said she had no intention at the moment to leave her husband. At one point, a newscaster asked if she realised she was speaking on television.

The Pakistani journalist, in interviews with Indian TV stations on Thursday, denied that she was having an affair with Tharoor. She said she had met him in the past for interviews.

Tharoor was UN undersecretary-general for communications and public information under former secretary general Kofi Annan. His name was among those considered for the top UN post in 2006, when Ban Ki-moon was voted in.

In 2009, Tharoor won a seat in India's parliament and later became a minister in prime minister Manmohan Singh's government.

Company behind West Virginia chemical spill files for bankruptcy

Posted: 17 Jan 2014 01:38 PM PST

Freedom Industries Inc has faced lawsuits and demands for payment in cash since leak polluted water supply

Should hunting an endangered rhino be allowed if it raises money to save other rhinos? | Poll

Posted: 17 Jan 2014 01:03 PM PST

A Texas man paid $350,000 to obtain a permit to kill one rare black rhino in Namibia. The money will be used for conservation efforts. Should he be allowed to hunt the rhino?

US telecoms giants express unease about proposed NSA metadata reforms

Posted: 17 Jan 2014 01:02 PM PST

AT&T concerned about being forced to retain customers' data as tech firms hail 'positive progress' on privacy protections

Dominic Rushe

What purpose organised atheism? | @guardianletters

Posted: 17 Jan 2014 12:59 PM PST

Zoe Williams says that if you place religious belief on the human rights agenda then you have to allow atheism equal weight (Comment, 15 January). It would be better to simply place "religious belief or non-belief" on the agenda. This is because the term "atheist" is freighted with much excess baggage as in the Northern Irish joke: "But are you a Catholic atheist or a Protestant atheist?" What if the asylum seeker in question had pleaded his agnosticism or secularism or humanism? I gave up my belief in pixies and Father Christmas some time ago but that does not make me a positive non-believer in them, possibly with an axe to grind. They are simply not part of my worldview and nor is belief in a deity. The US is by far the most religious western country and yet it maintains a strict separation of church and state where public education is concerned. I wish we did the same.

Some stridently pro-atheism books have appeared in recent years but this can lead to polarisation. The best book I have come across is The Book of Atheist Spirituality by the French philosopher André Comte-Sponville. It is a gentle, good-humoured book which points out that a number of eastern religions have spiritual beliefs without requiring the existence of deity or deities.

Zoe Williams laments that atheists do not organise, but nor do Santa deniers. I belonged to a humanitarian group set up by religious people because what the group did was needed and had nothing directly to do with religion. We can work together for the common good while maintaining diametrically opposed views, we don't need to set up atheist alternatives to everything. This does not stop us from fighting for a totally secular education system (and for the abolition of private education) with whatever appropriate pressure groups.
Joseph Cocker
Leominster, Herefordshire

• Perhaps in order to get more attention from "people of faith", we atheists need a version of atheism that is clearly a rational development and improvement over traditional faiths. The traditional God needs to be cut in half. On the one hand, there is the God of cosmic power, Einstein's God, the underlying unity in the physical universe that determines all that goes on, omnipotent, eternal, omnipresent, but an It, so such that we can forgive it all the terrible things It does. On the other hand, there is the God of cosmic value, all that is of value associated with our human world and the world of sentient life more generally. Having cut the traditional God in two in this way, the problem then is to see how the two halves can be put together again. That is our fundamental problem, of thought and life: How can all that is of value associated with our human world exist and best flourish embedded as it is in the physical universe?
Nicholas Maxwell
Emeritus reader, department of science and technology studies, University College London

• It narks me too that the voice of active unbelievers is treated as irrelevant. Recently, apropos of what I don't remember, a woman I know looked me in the eye and said: "We are all God's children." I was dying to say, "I wouldn't presume to tell you you're a grown-up and you should take responsibility for yourself", for fear I might seem rude. Therein lies the rub. Atheists don't want that weird certainty over the big questions and answers. I really don't give a toss what happened before the big bang. My own preoccupation is how on earth we are going to take care of our planet because, sure as anything, God is not a bit bothered about our potential destruction of it. Being an atheist is about taking responsibility for our own actions, putting our raison d'être inside not outside. We have every right to have the same courtesy extended to us as I extend to people of faith.
Judy Marsh
Nottingham

• Zoe Williams' quote from Richard Dawkins, "there is no such thing as a Muslim baby", is reminiscent of the words of Lalon Shah (1774-1890), a Bengali mystic, philosopher and songwriter who rejected all distinctions of caste and creed and wrote in a song well-known to many Bengali people: "Do you bear the sign of caste or creed when you come into this world or when you leave it?"
Val Harding
London

Pennsylvania judge strikes down restrictive voter eligibility law

Posted: 17 Jan 2014 12:53 PM PST

State's failure to make required photo ID readily available disenfranched 'hundreds of thousands' unconstitutionally, court rules

Paul Lewis

Aneka Info

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