Contemporary fiction titles are those which focus on the present or near past. Stories rooted in the current cultural, social, and political landscape which feature characters we can all recognise.
Contemporary Fiction Books
Faber & Faber Burntcoat
Book SynopsisAn electrifying story of passion, connection and transformation from 'a writer of show-stopping genius' (Guardian).'Dark and brilliant.' SARAH MOSS'A masterpience.' DAISY JOHNSON'Extraordinary.' SARAH PERRY'Hall has set a bar . . . Finely wrought, intellecutally brave and emotionally honest.'THE SCOTSMANIn the bedroom above her immense studio at Burntcoat, the celebrated sculptor Edith Harkness is making her final preparations. The symptoms are well known: her life will draw to an end in the coming days.Downstairs, the studio is a crucible glowing with memories and desire. It was here, when the first lockdown came, that she brought Halit. The lover she barely knew. A presence from another culture. A doorway into a new and feverish world. 'Sarah Hall makes language shimmer and burn . . . One of the finest writers at work today.'DAMON GALGUT'WTrade Review'Hall has set a bar . . . Finely wrought, intellecutally brave and emotionally honest.' - THE SCOTSMAN
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Faber & Faber Hystopia
Book SynopsisAt the bitter end of the 1960s, upon his return home from combat in the Vietnam War, twenty-two-year old Eugene Allen writes a novel called HYSTOPIA. It is set in a strangely destabilized historical moment, where President Kennedy is entering his third term in office, and a new federal agency maintains the mental health of returning soldiers by wiping their memories through drugs and therapy, while those beyond help roam at will, re-enacting the atrocities they have witnessed. Outlandish and tender, funny and violent, timely and historical, Hystopia is a wild, gonzo experience about the nature of trauma, homecoming, and the redemptive power of storytelling.
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Faber & Faber The RedHaired Woman
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Faber & Faber The Golden Legend
Book SynopsisSHORTLISTED FOR THE JHALAK PRIZE 2018For weeks, someone has been broadcasting people's secrets from the minarets of the city's mosques, striking fear into the hearts of Christians and Muslims alike. Then when shots ring out on the Grand Trunk Road, and Nargis's husband, Massud, a fellow architect, is caught in the crossfire, she is unable to confess to him her greatest secret before he dies. But as the anonymous broadcasts continue, is it merely a matter of time before her past is exposed? The Golden Legend is a timely and luminous story of corruption, resilience and the hope that only love and the human spirit can offer.
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Faber & Faber The Anthill
Book SynopsisA dark and unsettling debut novel from one of the most innovative young fiction writers today - a searing and affecting depiction of what redemption can be for a person and for a country in the wake of conflict.'An engrossing tale of a young woman's return to her roots in the troubled streets of Medellin.' Sunday Times'A brilliant, feverishly imaginative novel.' Sharlene TeoTrade Review'Written in prose that disrespects established boundaries to reveal a unique and courageous voice, Julianne Pachico's The Anthill, is the story of two young people searching for identity and belonging. In doing so, and with the lightest of touches, Pachico lays bare the trauma of life in post-peace Columbia.' - Ingrid Persaud, author of Love after Love'A stark look at a traumatized city and the way privilege corrupts.' - Elle
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Faber & Faber Adele
Book SynopsisFrom the bestselling author of Lullaby'Riveting.' Evening Standard'Explosive.' Mail on Sunday'Thrilling.' Sunday Times'A must-read.' VogueHer obsessions devour her.
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Faber & Faber The Neighborhood
Book SynopsisWhen a high-profile businessman is blackmailed by a notorious magazine editor, his comfortable life is threatened by the salacious exposé. Then the editor is found murdered, and the two couples have no choice but to descend into the murkiest depths of Peruvian society, while the magazine's staff embarks on its greatest revelation yet .
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Faber & Faber Kureishi H Intimacy
Book SynopsisIt is the saddest night, for I am leaving and not coming back.' Jay is leaving his partner and their two sons. As the long night before his departure unfolds, in an unforgettable, and often pitiless, reflection on their time together he analyses the joys and agonies of trying to make a life with another person.
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Faber & Faber Something to Tell You
Book SynopsisJamal Khan, a psychoanalyst in his fifties living in London, is haunted by memories of his teens: his first love, Ajita; the exhilaration of sex, drugs and politics; and a brutal act of violence which changed his life for ever. As he and his best friend Henry attempt to make the sometimes painful, sometimes comic transition to their divorced middle age, balancing the conflicts of desire and dignity, Jamal''s teenage traumas make a shocking return into his present life.
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Faber & Faber Patient X The CaseBook of Ryunosuke Akutagawa
Book SynopsisRyuosuke Akutagawa was one of Japan's great writers. He lived through Japan's turbulent Taisho period, including the devastating 1923 earthquake, only to take his own life at the age of just thirty-five in 1927.Inpsired by Akutagawa's stories, essays and letters, David Peace has fashioned an extraordinary novel of tales. An intense, passionate, haunting paean to one writer, it also thrillingly explores the act of writing itself, and the role of the artist, both in public and private life, in times which darkly mirror our own.
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Faber & Faber The Tempest
Book SynopsisAfter many years away, Andreas returns to his childhood home: a small island off the Norwegian coast where he grew up with his sister Minna. Their foster father Johannes has just died, and he must sort through their decaying old house, the Yellow Villa. As he settles back into rural life, Andreas begins to question the shadowy history of the island itself. Owned by Jan-Heinz Kaufmann, who had been a minister in the wartime government, the island has been a summer colony for deprived evacuee children from occupied Oslo. But decades later, Kaufmann remains an elusive figure, and the ultimate purpose of his wartime refuge and his relationship to Andreas and Minna after their parents' sudden disappearance remains mysterious.
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Faber & Faber The Book of Chocolate Saints
Book SynopsisThe Book of Chocolate Saints follows the unforgettable character Francis Newton Xavier and his journey towards salvation - or damnation - or perhaps both.
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Faber & Faber Light Perpetual
Book Synopsis**Longlisted for the Booker Prize 2021****Winner of the RSL Encore Award**** From the author of Golden Hill **'My god he can write.' Richard Osman'Glorious.' Evening Standard'Exhilarating.' TLS'Brilliant.' Observer'Dazzling.' The Times'Extraordinary.' Financial Times'Superb.' GuardianNovember 1944. A German rocket strikes London and five young children are atomised in an instant. Here are the futures they might have known, had they experienced the unimaginable changes of the twentieth century - futures that illuminate the miraculous in the everyday, and the preciousness of life itself.
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Faber & Faber The Lost Girls
Book SynopsisBeautifully written, intense.'' LISA BALLANTYNE''A thrilling, emotive and heartfelt mystery.'' CHRIS WHITAKERFROM THE AUTHOR OF BESTSELLING DEBUT THE GIRL IN THE RED COATLost, she narrowly escaped disaster.Beth is desperate to return to normality. After a years-long ordeal, her daughter is finally home and safe. But Carmel has questions she can't ignore about the cult that kidnapped her, and about the preacher who gave her another girl's name.Found, she must survive a miracle.Digging into her past, Carmel uncovers secrets which suggest that she wasn't the only lost girl and which puts her in danger all over again. While her mother struggles to salvage the safety they've only just found, Carmel tries to come to terms with who she has become. One question, a mystery at the heart of her disappearance as a child, haunts her:What happened to the other lost girls?''As affirming as it
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Faber & Faber Cahokia Jazz
Book SynopsisUtterly immersive' SpectatorThrilling' Financial TimesUnlike anything else you will read this year' Daily Express A classic of alternative history' Observer A delight' Sunday TelegraphA Guardian, Financial Times, New Statesman and Times Literary Supplement Book of the Year A thrilling tale of murder and mystery in a city where history has run a little differently -- from the bestselling author of Golden Hill.In a city that never was, in an America that never was, on a snowy night at the end of winter, two detectives find a body on the roof of a skyscraper.It's 1922, and Americans are drinking in speakeasies, dancing to jazz, stepping quickly to the tempo of modern times. But in this 1922, things are a little different. Beside the Mississippi, the ancient city of Cahokia lives on a teeming industrial metropolis, conta
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Faber & Faber Memoirs of a Foxhunting Man
Book SynopsisI can hear the creak of the saddle and the clop and clink of hoofs as we cross the bridge over the brook by Dundell Farm; there is a light burning in the farmhouse window, and the evening star glitters above a broken drift of half-luminous cloud It is with a sigh that I remember simple moments such as those, when I understood so little of the deepening sadness of life, and only the strangeness of the spring was knocking at my heart.In the 1920s, a young man, grappling with the horrors of the war from which he had just returned, decided to write about a happier time. A time of cricket matches and fox-hunting, the busyness of village life and the shyness of youth.That man was Siegfried Sassoon, and this is his book. Originally published anonymously, it went on to become Faber & Faber's first bestseller. A classic depiction of pre-First World War Britain, Memoirs of a Fox-Hunting Man tells two mirrored stories, about a boy coming of age and a countr
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Faber & Faber Lullaby
Book Synopsis**SOON TO BE A MAJOR HBO SHOW STARRING NICOLE KIDMAN AND MAYA ERSKINE**THE INTERNATIONAL BESTSELLERA RICHARD AND JUDY PICKWINNER OF THE DEBUT NOVEL OF THE YEAR AT THE BRITISH BOOK AWARDSA SUNDAY TIMES TOP 100 NOVEL OF THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY''Creepy, shocking, compulsive'' The Times, BOOKS OF THE YEAR''Unnerving, addictive.'' Grazia''The smartest thriller you''ll read this year.'' IndependentThe baby is dead. It took only a few seconds.When Myriam, a brilliant lawyer, decides to return to work, she and her husband look for a nanny for their two young children. They never dreamed they would find Louise: a quiet, polite and devoted woman who sings to their children, cleans the family's chic Paris apartment, stays late without complaint and hosts enviable birthday parties. But as the couple and their nanny become more and more dependent on each other, jealousy, res
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Faber & Faber In the City of Loves Sleep
Book SynopsisIris, a museum conservator in her late forties, is separating from her husband while bringing up two daughters.Raif is a stalled academic, as uncertain of the past as he is of the future, whose girlfriend is about to move in with him. When Iris and Raif first meet by chance, Iris suddenly turns away and starts to run. She is running from what this encounter has woken in her.In the City of Love's Sleep is a contemporary story about what it means to fall in love in middle age. It charts the steps two people take towards one another and what it means to have taken those steps before.
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Faber & Faber The Hours Before Dawn
Book SynopsisWATERSTONES THRILLER OF THE MONTH AUTHOR: ''Britain''s Patricia Highsmith'' (Sunday Times)Discover the original psychological thriller as a sleep-deprived young mother struggles to stay sane.''A lost masterpiece.'' Peter Swanson''Brilliant ... Such clever, witty writing.'' Elly Griffiths''Fremlin packs a punch.'' Ian Rankin''Splendid ... Got me hooked.'' Ruth Rendell''A slow-burning chill of a read by a master of suspense.'' Janice Hallett''The grandmother of psycho-domestic noir; Britain''s Patricia Highsmith.'' Sunday TimesLouise would give anything - anything - for a good night's sleep. Forget the girls running errant in the garden and bothering the neighbours. Forget her husband who seems oblivious to it all. If the baby would just stop crying, everything would be fine.Or would it? What if Louise's growing fears about the family's new lodger, who seems
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Faber & Faber A Long Way From Home
Book SynopsisLonglisted for the 2019 International DUBLIN Literary AwardShortlisted for the 2019 Walter Scott Historical Fiction PrizeIrene Bobs loves fast driving. Her husband is the best car salesman in rural south eastern Australia. Together they embark upon the Redex Trial, a brutal car race around the continent, over roads no car can ever quite survive.Set during the 1950s in the dying embers of the British Empire, A Long Way from Home is a thrilling high-speed story, illuminating a country's relationship with its own ancient culture, and the love made and hurt caused along the way.
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Faber & Faber Immigrant Montana
Book SynopsisA New York Times Book of the YearChosen by Barack Obama as one of his books of the year Meet Kailash. Also known as Kalashnikov. Or AK-47. Or just plain AK. His journey from India has taken him to graduate school in New York where he keeps falling in love: not just with women, but with literature and radical politics, the fuel of youthful exuberance. Each heady affair brings new learning: about himself, and about his relationship to a country founded on immigration a country that is now unsure of the migrant's place in the nation's fabric. But how can AK learn to belong when he's in a constant state of exile
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Faber & Faber The Last Ballad
Book SynopsisElla May Wiggins' husband has run off again, and she must keep her four young children alive with the only work she can find -- the night shift at a North Carolina mill. When union leaflets begin to circulate, she yearns for the better life the organisers promise. But the mill owners, backed by other nefarious forces, claim the union is nothing but a front for the Bolshevik menace sweeping across Europe, and they will use every means in their power, including bloodshed, to prevent the workers banding together
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Faber & Faber A Boy of Good Breeding
Book SynopsisKnute is a twenty-four-year-old single mother who returns home to Algren with her daughter to look after her father Tom, who has suffered a heart attack. Meanwhile, Hosea Funk, a friend of Tom''s and the mayor of Algren has a lot on his mind. The prime minister has promised to pay a visit to whichever town in Canada has the smallest population. Algren has held this position for some time but recent baby booms and returning families, like Knute, threaten to tip Algren over the magic 1500 . . .
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Faber & Faber The Flying Troutmans
Book Synopsis''In this chaotic world the only stability comes from our love for one another, quirks and all. In Toews''s hands, that can be funny or heartbreaking, usually at the same time.'' Washington PostMeet the Troutmans. Hattie is living in Paris, city of romance, but has just been dumped by her boyfriend. Min, her sister back in Canada, is going through a particularly dark period. And Min''s two kids, Logan and Thebes, are not talking and talking way too much, respectively. When Hattie receives a phone call from eleven-year-old Thebes, begging her to return to Canada, she arrives home to find Min on her way to a psychiatric ward, and becomes responsible for her niece and nephew. Realising that she is way out of her league, Hattie hatches a plan to find the kids'' long-lost father. With only the most tenuous lead to go on, she piles Logan and Thebes into the family van, and they head south . . .
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Faber & Faber Trolls
Book SynopsisNever mind Scandi crime fiction, the time has come for Scandi horror.' Metro *****What if...?A large wolf escapes its captors.A cult leader breaks out of psychiatric care.A disillusioned woman is forced to end her self imposed exile.Stefan Spjut's latest novel explores the ancient notion that our forests may be inhabited by beings we do not understand, creatures neither animal nor human, living in the shadows . . .Thriller, horror fiction, suspense, Trolls is set ten years on from hit novel Stallo, as Susso Myrén's world once again starts to shift around her
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Faber & Faber Girl
Book SynopsisThe final novel by the legendary Irish icon Edna O'Brien, author of The Country Girls.''The taboo-breaking, the fabulous prose there''s no one like Edna.'' Anne Enright''Girl broke me in two: a hard and beautiful miracle.'' Eimear McBride''An extraordinary act of imagination.'' J.M. Coetzee ''Glittering energy . . . Exemplary.'' Colm TóibínI was a girl once, but not any more . . .A young Nigerian woman, barely more than a girl herself, must learn to survive with a child of her own, in a world which seems entirely consumed by madness. As she navigates a landscape of terrors and trials, ruled by Boko Haram, can she find a place of safety within a society blinkered by mistrust and denial?Astonishing.' New StatesmanRaw and transfixing.' ObserverA masterpiece.' Irish IndependentMesmerising.' Sunday TimesDevastating and moving.' Daily Tel
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Faber & Faber A Lonely Man
Book SynopsisA New Statesman Book of the Year 2021A Metro Book of the Year 2021A Washington Post '10 Best Thriller and Mystery Books of 2021''Gripping.' FINANCIAL TIMES'A classy page-turner.' MAIL ON SUNDAY'A taut, subtle, postmodern literary thriller.' SUNDAY TIMESWhen two men meet in a bookshop in Berlin they begin an uneasy friendship. Patrick has a sensational story to tell: a ghostwriter for a Russian oligarch recently found hanged, he says the people who killed his boss are now following him...A twist on the cat-and-mouse narrative, A Lonely Man is about the search for identity and the elastic nature of truth. As the two men's association hurtles towards tragedy, Robert is forced to confront whether actual events are the only things that give a story life, and if some stories are too dangerous to tell.'A remarkable debut; an accomplisheTrade Review'A Lonely Man is a remarkable debut; an accomplished and intricately plotted story that manages to be both thrilling and deeply considered. If you're a fan of existential crises, family dramas, Putin-era paranoias, and Bolao-style multiplicities, and want to see them woven into one taut novel, you're in the right place. A lonely triumph.' - Jon McGregor'A classy page-turner... Unbearably tense, the intricate narrative delivers electric drama as well as thought-provoking reflections on storytelling ethics.' - Mail on Sunday
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Faber & Faber Leila Prayaag Akbar
Book SynopsisShalini will never forget her daughter Leila's third birthday party: it was the last time she saw her alive. Sixteen years have passed and Shalini's life is unrecognizable. Her husband gone: beaten and dragged from their home the night Leila disappeared. Shalini, once privileged, is now disgraced. She trawls the streets desperate to discover where Leila now lives if she lives at all. In this repressive state, where tradition and purity are valued above all, those outside the city walls forced to live in filth and oppressive heat are less than nothing. But can Shalini find a way back in? Will she see Leila again?
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Faber & Faber Sudden Traveller Winner of the BBC National Short
Book Synopsis*WINNER OF THE BBC NATIONAL SHORT STORY AWARD 2020*SHORTLISTED FOR THE EDGE HILL SHORT STORY PRIZESHORTLISTED FOR THE JAMES TAIT BLACK MEMORIAL PRIZEA Guardian, Financial Times and Irish Times Book of the Year''No one writes stories the way Hall does and quite possibly no one ever will. Astonishing, miraculous, a gift.'' Daisy JohnsonThe queen of dark short fiction.' Guardian Astonishing, miraculous, a gift.' Daisy JohnsonThe best short story writer in Britain.' SpectatorIn Turkish forests or rain-drenched Cumbrian villages, characters walk, drive, dream and fly, trying to reconcile themselves with their journey through life and death. Radical, charged with a transformative, elemental power, each of these stories invites us to stand at the very edge of our possible selves. Includes the story ''The Grotesques'', winner of the BBC Short Story Award, 2020.<
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Faber & Faber The Rapture
Book SynopsisPoignant'' Sunday TimesGripping.'' MetroFascinating.' The TimesEnrapturing.'' Red MagazineMiss Dilys Barltrop is a devoted member of The Panacea Society, a cult populated almost entirely by virtuous single women.When she strikes up a friendship with Grace a new recruit God finally seems to be smiling upon her. But Dilys is wary of her leader's zealotry, and fearful of those who watch her every move, hoping for a sign of the deep and terrible failings she struggles to keep hidden. Faith is supplanted by doubt, and as both women come to question what is true and fear what is real, Dilys will have to learn the true cost of absolute devotion...Trade Review'A remarkable story, remarkably told... Claire McGlasson is a brave and brilliant new voice in fiction.' - Jess Kidd, author of HIMSELF and THE HOARDER'An extremely accomplished debut... gripping, unsettling and ultimately extremely moving. It is a tale beautifully and sensitively told that continues to haunt me.' - Ruth Hogan, author of THE KEEPER OF LOST THINGS
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Faber & Faber When Ghosts Come Home
Book SynopsisA searing, thunderous, heartbreaking thriller.' CHRIS WHITAKER Taut, tense, and tender - this novel hits every note.' LILY KINGAn abandoned plane. A dead body. A small town threatening to explode.Investigating the mystery of an abandoned plane and a dead body, the Sheriff of the small town of Oak Island struggles to contain long-simmering racial tensions. His troubles are soon compounded by his returning daughter, whose marriage is falling apart, and the FBI pilot sent in to help with the case.
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Faber & Faber Out of Darkness Shining Light
Book SynopsisPrize-winning author Petina Gappah''s tale of Dr Livingstone''s epic journey through nineteenth-century Africa is incredible'' (Yaa Gyasi), ''powerful'' (Jesmyn Ward), and ''beautiful'' (Anthony Doerr).A fine writer.' J.M. Coetzee Wonderful.' The Times Captivating.' GuardianThis is the story of the body of Bwana Daudi, the Doctor, the explorer David Livingstone and the sixty-nine men and women who carried his remains for 1,500 miles across the African interior so that he could be borne across the sea and buried in his own country. This is the story of those in the shadows of history: those who saved a white man's bones, his dark companions, who became his faithful retinue on an epic funeral march - little knowing that his corpse carried the maps that sowed the seeds of the continent's brutal colonisation and enslavement. This is the story of how human bravery, loyalty, and love can
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Faber & Faber Summer of My Amazing Luck
Book Synopsis''Toews's debut is a tart, affectionate look at welfare mothers...Toews is especially good on the rollicking, happy, impoverished family of the projects [and] scathing about the humiliations of poverty.'' New York TimesLucy and her eight-month-old son live in a Winnipeg housing project filled with single mothers on the dole. Still dealing with her own mother's sudden death, and new to the ever-multiplying complications of life on welfare, Lucy strikes up a friendship with her neighbour, Lish. On the whole, they're pretty happy . . . But Lucy wants to make sure they stay happy. And she has a plan.Told with Toews's signature scalding wit and deep compassion, Summer of my Amazing Luck is a brilliantly funny book about the intricacies of friendship, grief, and poverty.''[A] picaresque account of two welfare moms having loopy adventures and getting by in the city... The novel's voice [is] amused, warm, curious, alive on the page.'' T
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Faber & Faber Sleepless Nights
Book SynopsisSally Rooney: High intelligence and beauty.'Margo Jefferson: ''Extraordinary''Rediscover a lost American classic in this kaleidoscopic scrapbook of one woman''s memories, with a new introduction by Eimear McBride. I am alone here in New York, no longer a we ... First published in 1979, Sleepless Nights is a unique collage of fiction and memoir, letters and essays, portraits and dreams. It is more than the story of a life: it is Elizabeth Hardwick''s experience of womanhood in the twentieth century. Escaping her childhood home of Kentucky, the narrator arrives at a bohemian hotel in Manhattan filled with ''drunks, actors, gamblers ... love and alcohol and clothes on the floor.'' Here begin the erotic affairs and dinner parties, the abortions and heartbreaks, the friendships and ''people I have buried''. Here are luminous sketches of characters she has met that illuminate the era''s racis
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Faber & Faber The Republic of False Truths
Book Synopsis''Glorious'' Observer''Amazing'' André Aciman''Masterly'' Sunday Times''Blistering'' Financial TimesGeneral Alwany is a pious man who loves his family. He also tortures and kills enemies of the state.Under the regime of Hosni Mubarak, Egypt is gripped by cronyism, religious hypocrisy, and the oppressive military. Now, however, the regime faces its greatest crisis. The idealistic young from different backgrounds - engineers, teachers, medical students, and among them the general's daughter - have come together to challenge the status quo.Euphoria mounts as Mubarak is toppled and love blossoms across class divides, but can it last?Rooted in first-hand experience, this searing account of the short-lived 2011 Egyptian revolution blends knockabout satire with real polemical anger.' Daily Mail A powerful book in the vein of a great Russian or South American social novel . . Trade Review'A masterly panorama of doomed revolution, Aswany's novel puts him in the company of writers such as Joseph Conrad or Mario Vargas Llosa as an outstanding fictional confronter of authoritarianism and its entrenched evils.' - Sunday Times'Exile has only whetted the blade of [Aswany's] satire . . a glorious, humane novel that chronicles the failure of a revolution and its personal cost without ever quite extinguishing hope of a better future.' - Observer'Rooted in first-hand experience, this searing account of the short-lived 2011 Egyptian revolution blends knockabout satire with real polemical anger.' - Daily Mail'A blistering, bold dissection of a failed revolution, and of the disenchantment and dissent that inevitably follow.' - Financial Times'An amazing portrait of fanaticism and cynicism among Egyptian powermongers.' - Andre Aciman, Guardian'An engaging, provocative and, ultimately, frustrating tour of the revolution, from its gestation to its bloody aftermath.' - The Economist'A powerful book in the vein of a great Russian or South American social novel . . . Al Aswanyis a writer of great talent, a rare man whose courage is not merely literary.' - Le Figaro'One of our greatest contemporary writers or, even better, the Pharaoh of the literary arts . . . A wonderful novel . . . Breathtaking . . . The Republic of False Truths is also a novel of ferocious comedy and dissent; Al Aswany attacks the hypocrisy of power, politics, and every aspect of religion, including its relationship to sexuality.' - France Culture'Brave, sobering, provocative, and thoroughly absorbing.' - Booklist'In telling the story of the Egyptian revolution of 2011 through the viewpoint of a variety of Cairenes both for and against, Alaa Al Aswany holds out the slender straw of hope against the slashing shears of repression. ' - Spectator'Exhilarating in its storytelling and devastating in its societal critique . . . an evocative and informed account of an important moment in Egyptian society.' - Irish Times
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Faber & Faber A Good Deliverance
Book Synopsis
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Faber & Faber A Good Deliverance
Book Synopsis ''The most enthralling kind of historical fiction.'' HILARY MANTEL ''Fresh, wholly original . . . a delight.'' THE TIMES''Vivid and amusing.'' SPECTATOR ''Very enjoyable.'' BIG ISSUEFrom the author of the Kingmaker series, an epic and intimate tale of adventure, myth and the creation of one of literature's greatest stories.Warwick, 1468. One drowsy summer afternoon, Sir Thomas Malory politician, courtier, outlaw, renowned author of Le Morte D'Arthur is seized from his garden and dragged to Newgate Prison for reasons unknown.Shivering in his foul-smelling, filthy old cell, Malory mourns his misspent life as he awaits the execution bell. But when the locking bar lifts, he is greeted by a boy of about twelve winters: the gaoler's son. Giddy with relief, Malory seizes the opportunity to recount his deeds to an audience.So begins a prison confession of a perilously exciting life full of sieges, battles and court intrigue. A Good Deliverance is the captivating tale of a man at odds with his past and the events that inspired him to write the first great work of prose fiction in English.Praise for the Kingmaker series:''Enthralling, honest . . . the past, here, is imagined with ferocity, with hunger to engage.'' HILARY MANTEL''Clements is so convincing on the detail of his characters'' lives that it is difficult to believe that he never walked in the brutal, messy world he conjures up on the page.''THE TIMES''Magnificent. A historical tour de force.''BEN KANE
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Faber & Faber Devotion
Book Synopsis''Sexy-but-literary'' Sunday Times''Complex and psychologically taut'' Observer ''Sensual and unsettling'' The Scotsman ''[A] literary psychological smoulderer'' Metro Desire. Deception. Destruction. Devotion.Ella is 26, lonely, hungry and far from home. Lonnie is also 26, but rich, talented and beautiful with a husband and son to match.Their fates intertwine the day Ella is hired as the family's nanny. She finds herself mesmerised by Lonnie's girlish affection and disregard for the normal boundaries of friendship and marriage, but soon resentment grows too.Crackling with sensuality and suspense, Madeline Stevens's debut novel is a dizzying thriller in which roles are confused and reversed and nothing is ever quite as it seems.
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Faber & Faber The Family Retreat
Book Synopsis''Beautifully written, emotionally intelligent.'' Daily Mail''What separates Thomas'' writing from your average domestic drama is its compelling persuasiveness.'' StylistONE PERFECT HOLIDAY. ONE SHOCKING ENDING.After a stressful year at work, GP Jess decides the family needs a seaside holiday.This idyllic Dorset cottage might just be the perfect escape. But when the neighbour hints at a dire predicament, Jess puts the idea of sun-kissed, sandy bliss on hold. Like a door nudged ajar, the lure of solving someone's problems invites her in.Fuelled by a heady rush of altruism, she decides to act a choice that will have unforgettable, potentially devastating consequences.Readers are gripped by The Family Retreat:***** ''What a fantastic read. I could not put it down!'' ***** ''A fantastic twist. . . I was completely hooked.''***** ''The plot was riveting.'' <
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Faber & Faber The Bookshop of the Broken Hearted
Book SynopsisThe perfect book for anyone who''s ever had their heart broken, anyone who''s ever had their broken heart mended, and anyone who''s ever visited a bookshop...Tom Hope doesn't chase rainbows. He does his best on the farm he milks the cows, harvests the apples, looks after the sheep but Tom's been lonely since his wife Trudy left, taking little Peter with her to go join the holy rollers.Enter Hannah Babel, quixotic smalltown bookseller: the second Jew and the most vivid person Tom has ever met. When she asks him to move in, and help her build Australia's most beautiful bookshop, Tom dares to believe they could make each other happy. But it is 1968: twenty-four years since Hannah and her own little boy arrived at Auschwitz. Tom Hope is taking on a battle with heartbreak he can barely even begin to imagine.
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Faber & Faber Wittgensteins Nephew
Book SynopsisLRB BOOKSHOP'S AUTHOR OF THE MONTH ONE OF THE GUARDIAN'S BEST BOOKS OF 2019WITH A NEW AFTERWORD BY BEN LERNER, AUTHOR OF THE TOPEKA SCHOOL'If you haven't read Bernhard, you will not know of the most radical advance in fiction since Joyce ...
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Faber & Faber The Country Life
Book SynopsisWINNER OF THE SOMERSET MAUGHAM AWARD''Cusk combines humour and striking emotional honesty.'' Financial Times''Cusk shows a brilliant, and often hilarious funny, aptitude for identifying surreal moments in social interaction.'' Evening Standard''Cusk is a highly interesting, original writer and more unusually she is a joy to read.'' The TimesStella Benson sets off for Hilltop, a tiny Sussex village housing a family that is somewhat larger than life. Her hopes for the Maddens may be high, but her station among them, as au pair to their irascible son Martin - is undeniably low. What could possibly have driven her to leave her home, job and life in London for such rural ignominy? Why has she severed all contact with her parents? Why is she so reluctant to talk about her past?The Country Life is a rich and subtle story about embarrassment, awkwardness and being alone; about families, or the lack of them; and about love in some peculiar guises.
£9.49
Faber & Faber The Bradshaw Variations
Book SynopsisThomas Bradshaw and Tonie Swann are experiencing the classic symptoms of marriage in its middle years: comfortable house, happy-enough daughter and an eerie sense that life might be happening elsewhere. Then Tonie accepts a big promotion at work and Thomas agrees to become a stay-at-home dad. While Thomas is suddenly faced with the daily silence of an empty house, Tonie finds herself alive to previously unimagined possibilities. And at the head of the family, the ageing Bradshaw parents continue their marital dynamic of bickering and petty undermining.
£9.49
Faber & Faber The Inner Room
Book SynopsisFaber Stories, a landmark series of individual volumes, presents masters of the short story form at work in a range of genres and styles. In perhaps the most magnificent of what he called his strange stories', Robert Aickman blurs the lines between memory, premonition and the hallucinated life.Lene, a woman now recovering from the losses of the Second World War, recalls a gothic dolls' house of her childhood and the way in which its uncanny inhabitants entered her dreams. Most chillingly, the geometries of the house didn't add up; there had to be a secret room inside it.Years later, she comes across a life-size version in a wood not marked on any map . . .Bringing together past, present and future in our ninetieth year, Faber Stories is a celebratory compendium of collectable work.
£6.23
Faber & Faber Dante and the Lobster
Book SynopsisFaber Stories, a landmark series of individual volumes, presents masters of the short story form at work in a range of genres and styles.
£6.99
Faber & Faber Mrs Fox
Book SynopsisFaber Stories, a landmark series of individual volumes, presents masters of the short story form at work in a range of genres and styles. Walking ahead of him on the heath, his wife turns to look at him over her shoulder, 'Topaz eyes glinting. Scorched face. Vixen.'In language harvested from nature, Sarah Hall tells a story of metamorphosis, of wildness and fecundity, and of a man reaching for reason, who cannot let go of the creature he loves.Bringing together past, present and future in our ninetieth year, Faber Stories is a celebratory compendium of collectable work.
£6.23
Faber & Faber Muscle
Book SynopsisIn a hard-boiled city of crooks, grifts and rackets lurk a pair of toughs: Box and _____. They''re the kind of men capable of extracting apologies and reparations, of teaching you a chilling lesson. They seldom think twice, and ask very few questions.Until one night over the poker table, they encounter a pulp writer with wild ideas and an unscrupulous private detective, leading them into what is either a classic mystery, a senseless maze of corpses, or an inextricable fever dream . . .Drunk on cinematic and literary influence, Muscle is a slice of noir fiction in collapse, a ceaselessly imaginative story of violence, boredom and madness.
£8.54
Faber & Faber Nights of Plague
Book Synopsis
£10.44
