Search results for ""Faber Faber""
Faber & Faber The New York Trilogy
The New York Trilogy is perhaps the most astonishing work by one of America's most consistently astonishing writers. The Trilogy is three cleverly interconnected novels that exploit the elements of standard detective fiction and achieve a new genre that is all the more gripping for its starkness. It is a riveting work of detective fiction worthy of Raymond Chandler, and at the same time a profound and unsettling existentialist enquiry in the tradition of Kafka or Borges. In each story the search for clues leads to remarkable coincidences in the universe as the simple act of trailing a man ultimately becomes a startling investigation of what it means to be human. The New York Trilogy is the modern novel at its finest: a truly bold and arresting work of fiction with something to transfix and astound every reader.'Marks a new departure for the American novel.' Observer'A shatteringly clever piece of work . . . Utterly gripping, written with an acid sharpness that leaves an indelible dent in the back of the mind.' Sunday Telegraph'The New York Trilogy established him as the only author one could compare to Samuel Beckett.' Guardian
£9.25
Faber & Faber Running with the Kenyans: Discovering the secrets of the fastest people on earth
Sunday Times Sports Book of the YearShortlisted for the William Hill Sports Book of the Year AwardWinner - Best New Writer category at the British Sports Book AwardsAfter years of watching Kenyan athletes win the world's biggest long-distance races, Runner's World contributor Adharanand Finn set out to discover what it was that made them so fast - and to see if he could keep up. Packing up his family, he moved to Iten, Kenya, the running capital of the world, and started investigating. Was it running barefoot to school, the food, the altitude, or something else? At the end of his journey he put his research to the test by running his first marathon, across the Kenyan plains.This edition includes a new chapter covering the 2012 Olympics.
£10.99
Faber & Faber Alan Ayckbourn Plays 4
The Revengers' ComediesA hugely entertaining pitch that recalls the old movies to which it frequently pays homage - Strangers on a Train, Rebecca, Kind Hearts and Coronets - and expands after intermission to reveal an immensely disturbing vision of contemporary middle-class England poisoned by the rise of economic ruthlessness and the collapse of ethics. New York Times Things We Do for LoveLloyds Private Banking Playwright of the Year AwardOne of his best, his most shockingly and uproariously funny: a cruel and hilarious masterpiece of tragic comedy and comic tragedy. Sunday TimesHouse & GardenThe triumph of his ingenuity lies in the fact that you have to see both plays . . . A second time round, in whichever order you take them, characters will deepen, while those you know become the background. It is a superb Ayckbourn joke that a comedy about non-communication should depend on the sharpest communication skills. Sunday Times
£15.29
Faber & Faber No Angel: The Secret Life of Bernie Ecclestone
'I'm no angel.' Bernie Ecclestone Born into poverty, Bernie Ecclestone has made himself a billionaire by developing the world's second most popular sport - Formula One racing. Private, mysterious and some say sinister, the eighty-year-old criss-crosses the globe in his private jet, mixing with celebrities, statesmen and sporting heroes. His success is not just in creating a multibillion-pound global business but in resisting repeated attempts to snatch the glittering prize from his control. Ecclestone has never before revealed how he graduated from selling second-hand cars in London's notorious Warren Street to become the major player he is today. He has finally decided to reveal his secrets: the deals, the marriages, the disasters and the successes in Formula One racing, in Downing Street, in casinos, on yachts and in the air. Surprisingly, he has granted access to his inner circle to Tom Bower, described by Ecclestone as 'The Undertaker' - the man who buries reputations - and has given him access to all his friends and enemies. All have been told by Ecclestone, 'Tell him the truth, good or bad.' No Angel is a classic rags-to-riches story, the unique portrayal of a unique man and an intriguing insight into Formula One racing, business and the human spirit. Tom Bower is the author of nineteen books, including biographies of Robert Maxwell, Mohamed Fayed, Gordon Brown, Richard Branson, Conrad Black and more recently, Simon Cowell.
£12.99
Faber & Faber In These Times: Living in Britain through Napoleon's Wars, 1793–1815
Shortlisted for the Duff Cooper PrizeAs the Napoleonic wars raged, what was life really like for those left at home? Award-winning social historian Jenny Uglow reveals the colourful and turbulent everyday life of Georgian Britain through the diaries, letters and records of farmers, bankers, aristocrats and mill-workers. Here, lost voices of ordinary people are combined with those of figures we know, from Austen and Byron to Turner and Constable. In These Times movingly tells the story of how people really lived in one of the most momentous and exciting periods in history.
£15.29
Faber & Faber Self-Help: ‘One of America’s most brilliant writers.’ Stylist
'America's first lady of darkness and mirth.' Guardian'I'd rather spend time with her than anyone else on Earth.' Nicole Flattery'Lorrie Moore is one of my very favourite writers.' Monica HeiseyComplicated, awkward, funny, cruel, heartbroken, mysterious; Self-Help forms an idiosyncratic guide to female existence which is just as relevant today as it was 30 years ago. These stories are modern America at its most real, with characters sharing thoughts and experiences they could have borrowed from our own lives. This is how to deal with divorce, adultery, cancer, how to talk to your mother or become a writer, the Lorrie Moore way.
£9.99
Faber & Faber Why Mahler?: How One Man and Ten Symphonies Changed the World
A century after his death, Gustav Mahler is the most important composer of modern times. Displacing Beethoven as a box-office draw, heard in Hollywood films and on state occasions, his music inspires particular devotion. Some believe it helps heal emotional wounds, others find intellectual fascination in its contradictory meanings, and many feel that the music captures the yearnings and anxieties of our post-industrial society. In this highly original account of the composer's life and work, Norman Lebrecht explores the Mahler Effect, asking why Mahler's music has become the soundtrack to our twenty-first-century lives.
£12.99
Faber & Faber The Less Deceived
Philip Larkin's second collection, The Less Deceived was published by The Marvell Press in 1955, and now appears for the first time in Faber covers.The eye can hardly pick them out From the cold shade they shelter in, Till wind distresses tail and mane; Then one crops grass, and moves about - The other seeming to look on - And stands anonymous again. from 'At Grass'
£10.99
Faber & Faber The Remains of the Day
*Kazuo Ishiguro's new novel Klara and the Sun is now available*WINNER OF THE BOOKER PRIZEA contemporary classic, The Remains of the Day is Kazuo Ishiguro's beautiful and haunting evocation of life between the wars in a Great English House. In the summer of 1956, Stevens, the ageing butler of Darlington Hall, embarks on a leisurely holiday that will take him deep into the countryside and into his past. 'A triumph . . . This wholly convincing portrait of a human life unweaving before your eyes is inventive and absorbing, by turns funny, absurd and ultimately very moving.' Sunday Times'A dream of a book: a beguiling comedy of manners that evolves almost magically into a profound and heart-rending study of personality, class and culture.' New York TImes Book Review
£9.99
Faber & Faber Here Comes Everybody: The Story of the Pogues
October 1982: ABC, Culture Club, Shalamar and Survivor dominate the top twenty when the Pogues barrel out from the backstreets of King's Cross, a furious, pioneering mix of punk energy, traditional melodies and the powerfully poetic songwriting of Shane MacGowan. Reviled by traditionalists for their frequently fast, often riotous interpretations of Irish folk songs, the Pogues rose from the sweaty chaos of backroom gigs in Camden pubs to world tours with the likes of Elvis Costello, U2 and Bob Dylan, and had huge commercial success with everyone's favourite Christmas song, 'Fairytale of New York'. Yet, the exuberance of their live performances coupled with relentless touring spiralled into years of hard drinking and excess which eventually took their toll - most famously on Shane, but also on the rest of the band - causing them to part ways seven years later. Here, their story is told with beauty, lyricism and great candour by James Fearnley, founding member and accordion player. He brings to life the youthful friendships, the bust-ups, the amazing gigs, the terrible gigs, the fantastic highs and the dramatic lows in a hugely compelling, humorous, moving and honest account of life in one of our most treasured and original bands.
£12.99
Faber & Faber White Egrets
In White Egrets, Derek Walcott treats his characteristic subjects - the Caribbean's complex colonial legacy, the Western artistic tradition, the blessings and withholdings of old Europe (Andalucia, the Mezzogiorno, Amsterdam), the unaccomodating sublime of the new world, time's cunning passages, the poet's place in all of this - with a passionate intensity and drive that recall his greatest work. Through the systolic and mesmerizing repetition of theme and imagery, Walcott carries his surf-like cadence from poem to poem, and from sequence to sequence in this celebratory and close-knit collection.
£10.99
Faber & Faber Everybody Loves Our Town: A History of Grunge
Grunge, also known as the 'Seattle Sound', emerged from the Pacific north-west in the early part of the 1980s. With the unexpected success of Nirvana's single 'Smells Like Teen Spirit' in 1991, grunge became a household word overnight and launched an American music movement on a par with punk and hip-hop. In Everybody Loves Our Town , Mark Yarm draws from exclusive interviews to tell the whole story: the founding of originators like Soundgarden and the Melvins, the early successes of the Sub Pop record label, the rise of powerhouses Nirvana and Pearl Jam, the media hype, the suicide of Kurt Cobain, and finally, the genre's mid-to-late-nineties decline.
£12.99
Faber & Faber Nocturnes: Five Stories of Music and Nightfall
*Kazuo Ishiguro's new novel Klara and the Sun is now available*In Nocturnes, Kazuo Ishiguro explores ideas of love, music and the passing of time. From the piazzas of Italy to the 'hush-hush floor' of an exclusive Hollywood Hotel, the characters we encounter range from young dreamers to cafe musicians to faded stars, all of them at some moment of reckoning. Gentle, intimate and witty, this quintet is marked by a haunting theme - the struggle to keep alive a sense of life's romance, even as one gets older, relationships founder and youthful hopes recede.'Each of these stories is heartbreaking in its own way, but some have moments of great comedy, and they all require a level of attention that, typically, Ishiguro's writing rewards.' Observer '[They] come up on you quietly, but then haunt you for days . These little pieces could only be the work of a great composer.' Evening Standard'A fine and moving collection of stories, displaying his unique combination of the sad, the stoic and the consoling. It's about failure, but it dignifies failure, and with it, the human condition.' Margaret Drabble, Guardian
£9.99
Faber & Faber Company / Ill Seen Ill Said / Worstward Ho / Stirrings Still
These four last prose fictions by Samuel Beckett were originally published individually, and their composition spanned the final decade of his life. In Company a solitary hearer lying in blackness calls up images from the far-off past. Ill Seen Ill Said meditates upon an old woman living out her last days alone in an isolated snow-bound cottage, watched over by twelve mysterious sentinels. In Worstward Ho, a breathless speaker unravels the sense of things, acting out the unending injunction to 'Try again. Fail again. Fail better.' And Stirrings Still, published in the Guardian a few months before Beckett's death in 1989, is the last prose work and testament of 'this great soothsayer of the age, and of the aged' (Christopher Ricks). The present edition includes several short prose texts (Heard in the Dark I & II, One Evening, The Way, Ceiling) which represent work in progress or works ancillary to the composition of these late masterpieces.
£10.99
Faber & Faber The Black Monastery
When Nikos, a detective in the final years of his career, is persuaded back to his home town he is faced with the gory murder of a young boy near the old monastery. Echoing two murders committed 33 years previously in the exact same spot, and a mass cult suicide, it brings back a part of the island's history that it has tried hard to forget.There is a lot at stake - the island's lucrative tourist trade and the open secret of the drugs trade that goes hand in hand with the hordes of mainly young British holiday makers.As Nikos begins his investigation, two British crime writers arrive on the island. The best selling Kitty Carson, on a break from the pressures of writing and her strained relationship, and Jason an aspiring writer whose aim is to strike up a friendship with her and convince her to help him get published. As the two writers are thrown together in an unexpected way, another murder is committed and Jason and Kitty are drawn into an investigation of their own. As they discover more about the island's dark past what began as a diversion becomes a dangerous pursuit . . .
£8.99
Faber & Faber Constructions
First published in 1974 and republished following the success of Frayn's masterly work of philosophy, The Human Touch, Constructions is a dazzling, thought-provoking and fascinating book which explores some of the great problems in philosophy and of everyday life.
£8.99
Faber & Faber Habibi
Habibi, based on a Middle Eastern fable, tells the story of Dodola, who escapes being sold into slavery and rescues an abandoned baby she names Zam. They live in isolation in an old boat in the desert. As they age their relationship shifts from mother and son, to brother and sister and eventually lovers. In the meantime however Dodola is forced to prostitute herself to desert traders in order to provide for Zam. When he seeks an alternative means of income Dodola is captured by the Sultan and Zam is forced into a quest to try and rescue her.At heart Habibi is, like Blankets, a profound love story, but it also functions as a parable about the environment and the state of the world. Set in the place where Christianity and Islam began, it explores the fundamental connection between these religions, and also the relationship between the first and the third world and the increasingly important battle for the earth's resources.Ambitious, but always deeply felt, Habibi is a beautifully drawn and moving graphic novel that will get a huge amount of attention.
£22.50
Faber & Faber Man in the Dark
'I am alone in the dark, turning the world around in my head as I struggle through another bout of insomnia, another white night in the great American wilderness.' Seventy-two-year-old August Brill is recovering from a car accident in his daughter's house in Vermont. When sleep refuses to come, he lies in bed and tells himself stories, struggling to push back thoughts about things he would rather forget - his wife's recent death and the horrific murder, in Iraq, of his granddaughter's boyfriend, Titus. Brill, a retired book critic, imagines a parallel world in which America is not at war with Iraq but with itself. In this other America the Twin Towers did not fall on 9/11, and the 2000 election results led to secession, as state after state pulled away from the union and a bloody civil war ensued. As the night progresses, Brill's story grows increasingly intense, and what he is so desperately trying to avoid insists on being told. Joined in the early hours by his granddaughter, he gradually opens up to her and recounts another hidden story, this time of his own marriage. After she falls asleep, he at last finds the courage to revisit the trauma of Titus's death.Passionate and shocking, political and personal: Man in the Dark is a novel that reflects the consequences of 9/11, that forces us to confront the blackness of night even as it celebrates the existence of ordinary joys in a world capable of the most grotesque violence.
£9.99
Faber & Faber The Poems of T. S. Eliot Volume I: Collected and Uncollected Poems
Times Literary Supplement Book of the YearPegasus Award for Poetry Criticism, Poetry Foundation, ChicagoRichard J. Finneran Award, Society for Textual ScholarshipBest Scholarly Edition Award, Modernist Studies AssociationThe Poems of T. S. Eliot is the authoritative edition of one of our greatest poets, scrupulously edited by Christopher Ricks and Jim McCue. It provides, for the first time, a fully scrutinized text of Eliot's poems, carefully restoring accidental omissions and removing textual errors that have crept in over the full century in which Eliot has been so frequently printed and reprinted. The edition also presents many poems from Eliot's youth which were published only decades later, as well as others that saw only private circulation in his lifetime, of which dozens are collected for the first time. To accompany Eliot's poems, Christopher Ricks and Jim McCue have provided a commentary that illuminates the creative activity that came to constitute each poem, calling upon drafts, correspondence and other original materials to provide a vivid account of the poet's working processes, his reading, his influences and his revisions. The first volume respects Eliot's decisions by opening with his Collected Poems 1909-1962 in the form in which he issued it, shortly before his death fifty years ago. There follow in this first volume the uncollected poems from his youth that he had chosen to publish, along with such other poems as could be considered suitable for publication. The second volume opens with the two books of poems of other kinds that he issued, Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats and his translation of Perse's Anabase, moving then to verses privately circulated as informal or improper or clubmanlike. Each of these sections is accompanied by its respective commentary, and then, pertaining to the entire edition, there is a comprehensive textual history recording variants both manuscript and published. The Poems of T. S. Eliot is a work of enlightening scholarship that will delight and inform all those who read Eliot for pleasure, as well as all those who read with pleasure and for study. Here are a new accuracy and an unparalleled insight into the marvels and landmarks from The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock and The Waste Land through to Four Quartets.
£36.00
Faber & Faber Ariel: The Restored Edition
Upon the publication of her posthumous volume of poetry Ariel in 1965, Sylvia Plath became a household name. Readers may be surprised to learn that the draft of Ariel left behind by Plath when she died in 1963 is different from the volume of poetry eventually published to worldwide acclaim.This facsimile edition restores, for the first time, the selection and arrangement of the poems Sylvia Plath left at the point of her death. In addition to the facsimile pages of Sylvia Plath's manuscript, this edition also includes in facsimile the complete working drafts of the title poem 'Ariel' in order to offer a sense of Plath's creative process, as well as notes the author made for the BBC about some of the manuscript's poems, including 'Daddy' and 'Lady Lazarus'In her insightful foreword to this volume, Frieda Hughes, Sylvia Plath's daughter, explains the reasons for the differences between the previously published edition of Ariel as edited by her father, Ted Hughes, and her mother's original version published here. With this publication, Sylvia Plath's legacy and vision will be reevaluated in the light of her original working draft.
£12.99
Faber & Faber Walk the Blue Fields
Walk the Blue Fields by Claire Keegan is the long awaited second collection from the Booker-shortlisted author of Small Things Like These.A long-haired woman moves into the priest's house and sets fire to his furniture. That Christmas, the electricity goes out. A forester mortgages his land and goes off to a seaside town looking for a wife. He finds a woman eating alone in the hotel. A farmer wakes half-naked and realises the money is almost gone. And in the title story, a priest waits on the altar for a bride and battles, all that wedding day, with his memories of a love affair. In her long-awaited second collection, Claire Keegan observes an Ireland wrestling with its past.
£9.99
Faber & Faber The Amnesiac
James Purdew is quietly obsessed with his own past - in particular three years of his life, about which he remembers nothing. So he travels back to the city of H, where he lived during those years, and finds a familiar house, now derelict. Stripping the wallpaper from one of the rooms, James discovers the first chapter of Confessions of a Killer, a nineteenth-century thriller, which seems to offer clues to a tragedy that took place in the house many years before, and one to which James feel inexorably linked. A journey into a mysterious world of fiction and reality, The Amnesiac is a compelling novel by one of Britain's most innovative young storytellers.
£9.65
Faber & Faber Wounded
Training horses is dangerous - a head-to-head confrontation with 1,000 pounds of muscle takes courage. It is these same qualities that allow John and his uncle Gus to live in the beautiful high desert of Wyoming. A black horse trainer is a curiosity, at the very least, but the brutal murder of a young gay man pushes this small community to the teetering edge of intolerance. Highly praised for his storytelling and ability to address the toughest issues of our time with a touching originality, Everett offers a brilliant novel that explores a divided America.
£9.99
Faber & Faber The Fourth Man
In the course of a routine police raid Detective Inspector Frank Frølich of the Oslo Police saves Elizabeth Faremo from getting inadvertently caught in crossfire. By the time he learns that she is the sister of Jonny Faremo, wanted member of a larceny gang, it is already too late, he is obsessed. Suspected, suspended, and blindly in love, Frølich must find out if he is being used before his life unravels beyond repair.
£7.37
Faber & Faber Tales from Firozsha Baag
Here is a wonderful introduction to the residents of Firozsha Baag, an apartment complex in Bombay. We enter the daily routine and rhythm of their lives, and by the time we reach the final story we are as familiar with the people of Firozsha Baag as we are with our own neighbours. The crowded, throbbing life of India is brilliantly captured in this series of stories.
£9.99
Faber & Faber Death of a Naturalist
For the fortieth anniversary of its publication, in May 2006, Faber are reissuing Seamus Heaney's classic first collection, Death of a Naturalist, which on its appearance in 1966 won the Cholmondeley Award, the E.C. Gregory Award, the Somerset Maugham Award and the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize.'His words give us the soil-reek of Ireland, the colourful violence of his childhood on a farm in Derry. The full-blooded energy of these poems makes Death of a Naturalist the best first book of poems I've read for some time.' - C.B. Cox in the Spectator 'The power and precision of his best poems are a delight, and as a first collection Death of a Naturalist is outstanding [...] His subject is those things which are inherent or inherited. What he praises is to be praised in his own work.' - Christopher Ricks, New Statesman'Now, to pry into roots, to finger slime, To stare big-eyed Narcissus, into some springIs beneath all adult dignity. I rhymeTo see myself, to set the darkness echoing.'
£12.99
Faber & Faber Housekeeping
'A classic.' Guardian'A masterpiece.' The New Yorker'I just adore this book and have probably reread it a hundred times.' Michelle Zauner From the Orange Prize winning author of Home and Gilead.Housekeeping is the story of Ruth and Lucille, orphans growing up in the small desolate town of Fingerbone in the vast northwest of America.Abandoned by a succession of relatives, the sisters find themselves in the care of Sylvie, the remote and enigmatic sister of their dead mother. Steeped in imagery of the bleak wintry landscape around them, the sisters' struggle towards adulthood is powerfully portrayed in a novel about loss, loneliness and transience.
£9.99
Faber & Faber The Classical Style
'Brilliant and epoch-making.' Times Literary SupplementThe Classical Style is an established classic which has remained in print since its first publication in 1971. With his experience as a world-class pianist as well as as teacher at Harvard and Oxford, Charles Rosen produced the definitive survey of the language of the music of the classical period. In the book, Rosen concentrates on the three major figures of the time - Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven - because 'it is in terms of their achievements that the musical vernacular can best be defined'.In this expanded edition, Rosen follows the development of each composer's best known genres: for Haydn, the symphony and string quartet; for Mozart, the concerto, string quintet and comic opera; for Beethoven, the piano sonata. In addition, the author ranges widely through the material of classical music which falls outside these categories. 'The word "masterpiece" should be used rarely if at all. But it applies to The Classical Style . . . this book sets new standards for the application of language to music.' George Steiner
£19.80
Faber & Faber Ben Jonson
In this series, a contemporary poet selects and introduces a poet of the past. By their selection of verses and by the personal and critical reactions they express in their introductions, the selectors offer a passionate and accessible introduction to some of the greatest poets in history. Ben Jonson (1572-1637) was born in London, and became a leading poet, playwright and essayist of the Elizabethan age. In 1598he killed an actor in a duel but escaped hanging by pleading benefit of the clergy, and by 1616 had re-established enough Court favour to be awarded a pension by James I - in effect making him the first Poet Laureate.
£4.59
Faber & Faber The Ice Soldier
While the eyes of the world are focused upon attempts to scale Mount Everest, two young men - once members of the world's climbing elite, subsequently forced into premature retirement after the failure of a secret military operation in the Alps during World War II - have become outcasts of mountaineering society. Until, that is, a peculiar and dangerous request is made of them, drawing them back to the mountains on an exploit that will prove treacherous in more ways than one, as they confront not only the pitiless cruelty of nature but also the ghosts of their former selves.
£7.37
Faber & Faber Testimony: The Memoirs of Dmitri Shostakovich as related to and edited by Solomon Volkov
'A terrifying and unhappy book...' The GuardianThis astounding self-portrait covering the whole of Shostakovich's life (1906-1975) was prepared in collaboration with the distinguished Soviet musicologist Solomon Volkov. With the composer's consent, the manuscript was smuggled out of Soviet Russia - but Shostakovich, fearing reprisals, stipulated that the book should not appear until after his death. Ever since its publication in 1979 it has been the subject of controversy, some suggesting that Volkov invented parts of it, but most affirming that it revealed a profoundly ambivalent Shostakovich which the world had never seen before - his life at once triumphant and tragic.Either way, it remains indispensible to an understanding of Shostakovich's life and work. Testimony is intense and fiercely ironic, both plain-spoken and outspoken.
£14.99
Faber & Faber Collected Poems of Ted Hughes
For the first time, the vast canon of Ted Hughes's poetry together in one beautiful and collectable paperback edition.The Collected Poems spans fifty years of work, from Hawk in the Rain to the best-selling Birthday Letters. It also includes the complete texts of such seminal publications as Crow and Tales from Ovid as well as those children's poems that Hughes felt crossed over into adult poetry. Most significantly it also includes small press publications and editions that, until now, remain uncollected and have never before been available to a general readership. Ted Hughes - former Poet Laureate and the winner of the Whitbread and Forward Prizes - here demonstrates his presiding importance in English and twentieth-century poetry.'A guardian spirit of the land and language.' Seamus Heaney
£36.00
Faber & Faber The Pornographer
The provocative novel by 'one of the greatest writers of our era' (Hilary Mantel) and 'the Irish novelist everyone should read' (Colm Tóibín).Michael, a writer of pornographic fiction, creates an ideal world of sex through his two stock athletes, Colonel Grimshaw and Mavis Carmichael, while he bungles every phase of his entanglement with an older woman who has the misfortune to fall in love with him. But his insensitivity to this love is in direct contrast to the tenderness with which he attempts to make his aunt's slow death in hospital tolerable, while his employer, Maloney, failed poet and comic king of pornographers, comes gradually to preside over this broken world. Everywhere in this rich novel is the drama of opposites, but, above all, sex and death are never far from each other.'Wise and compelling ... Elegiac and graceful.' David Mitchell'I have admired, even loved, John McGahern's work since his first novel.' Melvyn Bragg
£9.99
Faber & Faber The Avignon Quintet: Monsieur, Livia, Constance, Sebastian and Quinx
The Avignon Quintet gathers Lawrence Durrell's five kaleidoscopic, Booker Prize-nominated novels - orbiting around the South of France in World War II - into one epic modern classic, one of 'the greatest novels of our time' (Sunday Times). 'Durrell is a magician. He juggles with glittering words, he conjures up "cloud capped towers, gorgeous palaces and solemn temples," he entrances, intrigues and impresses.' The TimesAvignon: the kingdom of kings and Popes, capital of the historic South of France, heart of legendary Provence. The entwined lives of a group of friends - and lovers - are transformed forever by the outbreak of World War II. But their dramatic present only plunges them further into the darkness of an ancient past, as they become entangled in buried plots, gnostic cults, religious rituals, and a mysterious hunt for hidden Knight's Templar treasure. From Hitler's Europe to the medieval world, French chateaus to Egyptian deserts, The Avignon Quintet is an epic symphony of ecstasy and terror, madness and memory, passion and death. Consisting of five majestic novels - Monsieur, Livia, Constance, Sebastian and Quinx - it is a wild, wise masterpiece that could only be written by the literary master of his century, Lawrence Durrell.'Entrancing ... Swooning ... Charged with Durrell's strange magic.' Guardian'An enigmatic and secretive work, a cluster of dark passages and gaudy treasure-filled caves ... Inventive gusto and fictive extravagance ... Sensational.' London Review of Books'Splendid ... Reckless all-or-nothing writing.' Sunday Telegraph 'A virtuoso, capable of extraordinary feats.' New York Times 'Pungent and teasing ... There is some insidious power in him that keeps one reading.' ObserverWhat readers are saying:'As if Proust had written Raiders of the Lost Ark ...Templars, gnostics, handsome princes, asylums, madness, Freudians, southern France, Egypt, ancient tombs, castles, exotica, erotica, incest, ghosts, gypsies, ascetics, spies, Nazis, secret societies, bordellos, feasts, Nubian lesbians, assassins disguised as nuns, literary doppelgangers, convents, hidden treasure, suicide, and art.''Mystery, love, incest, war, espionage, gypsies, mysticism, secret rituals: a masterful writer.' 'Magnificent ... An incredible level of writing that should be experienced by everyone who loves modern literature.''A masterpiece ... Unlike anything I've ever read.' 'The master at his peak.' 'The writing is spectacular, unlike anything today.' 'Deeply complex, very clever use of language and gripping. Highly recommended.' 'Hairs suddenly rise on the back of the neck ... Read with a glass of wine.'
£18.00
Faber & Faber Unapologetic: Why, despite everything, Christianity can still make surprising emotional sense
'Passionate, challenging, tumultuously articulate . . . Fascinating.' John Carey, Sunday Times'A wonderful, effortlessly brilliant book.' Evening Standard'A rare gem, a book that carries conviction by being honest all the way through.' John Gray, IndependentUnapologetic is a book for those curious about how faith can possibly work in the twenty-first century. But it isn't an argument that Christianity is true - because how could anyone know that (or indeed its opposite)? It's an argument that Christianity is recognisable, drawing on the deep and deeply ordinary vocabulary of human feeling, satisfying those who believe in it by offering a ruthlessly realistic account of the bits of our lives advertising agencies prefer to ignore.
£10.99
Faber & Faber The Dark
The celebrated second novel by 'one of the greatest writers of our era' (Hilary Mantel) and 'the Irish novelist everyone should read' (Colm Tóibín) is 'a perfectly written tour de force' (Sunday Times) and 'the best novel to come out of Ireland in many years.' (Irish Times)Set in rural Ireland, John McGahern's second novel is about adolescence and a guilty, yet uncontrollable sexuality that is contorted and twisted by both puritanical state religion and a strange, powerful and ambiguous relationship between son and widower father. Against a background evoked with quiet mastery, McGahern explores with precision and tenderness a human situation, superficially very ordinary, but inwardly an agony of longing and despair.'Wise and compelling ... Elegiac and graceful.' David Mitchell'I have admired, even loved, John McGahern's work since his first novel.' Melvyn Bragg
£9.99
Faber & Faber Imagining Reality
In Imaging Reality: The Faber Book of Documentary, Oscar-winning documentary-maker Kevin Macdonald (One Day in September, Touching the Void) and leading broadcaster/historian Mark Cousins (The Story of Film) offer an expanded, revised edition of their 'definitive, inspirational' (Independent) compendium on the roots and history of the documentary film. Imagining Reality takes the reader on a tour of the evolution of documentary film as an increasingly vibrant, polemical, experimental and entertaining form. It gathers a wide-ranging collection of writings by and about such groundbreaking documentary-makers as Vertov, Flaherty, Marcel Ophuls, Chris Marker, Kieslowski, Claude Lanzmann, and Nick Broomfield. The story is carried up to date by attention to the success documentaries have had among mainstream movie audiences in recent years, including Michael Moore's Bowling For Columbine and Fahrenheit 9/11, The Buena Vista Social Club, Spellbound, Capturing The Friedmans, Être Et Avoir, and The Fog Of War.
£14.99
Faber & Faber Sviatoslav Richter: Notebooks and Conversations
'To Richter (no first name necessary), warm greetings to the best pianist in the Soviet Union - indeed in the whole world.' ProkofievThroughout a life dedicated to music, Richter maintained a stubborn silence about his own ideals and aspirations. Here at last he opens up his heart in these exceptional interviews with Bruno Monsaingeon, who became close to Richter not long before the pianist's death in 1995. These conversations take us on a journey which begins with Richter's childhood memories, follows his early career and his development into 'an artist of the people', and finally charts his rise to international acclaim.Richter's personal notebooks, kept for nearly thirty years, constitute an unparalleled witness to the music of our time. The pianist writes with precision, humour and clarity and is uninhibitedly himself. These are the private thoughts of a nonconformist, one of the greatest performers of the century, yet one whose life was inextricably bound to the history of the USSR.
£15.29
Faber & Faber Xenophon's Retreat: Greece, Persia and the end of the Golden Age
It is 401 BC. After an epic battle in Persia, Xenophon is elected general of the defeated Greek army and must lead the men on a fraught journey back home - a journey of hundreds of miles, north from modern-day Iraq into the mountains of Kurdistan and Armenia, and down to the coast of the Black Sea, fighting all the way, harried on all sides by Persian forces, wild mountain tribesmen, and a bitter winter...A gripping adventure full of drama, human interest, strong characters, pathos, and triumph.
£12.99
Faber & Faber The History Boys
An unruly bunch of bright, funny sixth-form boys in pursuit of sex, sport and a place at university. A maverick English teacher at odds with the young and shrewd supply teacher. A headmaster obsessed with results; a history teacher who thinks he's a fool.In Alan Bennett's classic play, staff room rivalry and the anarchy of adolescence provoke insistent questions about history and how you teach it; about education and its purpose.The History Boys premiered at the National in May 2004.
£9.89
Faber & Faber The Coma
From the internationally-renowned author of The Beach, a gripping mystery and stylistic tour de force that delves into the subconscious mind, with brilliantly disturbing results.'A strange compelling ride into that realm where nothing is what it seems - and where night never really wakes up.' Douglas Kennedy, The Times'It's great story to read, but also a lovely visual object to possess.' Design Week 'Compelling and chilling ... his father's illustrations heighten the oddness.' Observer
£9.99
Faber & Faber Stanley: Africa's Greatest Explorer
Henry Morton Stanley was a cruel imperialist - a bad man of Africa. Or so we think: but as Tim Jeal brilliantly shows, the reality of Stanley's life is yet more extraordinary. Few people know of his dazzling trans-Africa journey, a heart-breaking epic of human endurance which solved virtually every one of the continent's remaining geographical puzzles. With new documentary evidence, Jeal explores the very nature of exploration and reappraises a reputation, in a way that is both moving and truly majestic.
£14.99
Faber & Faber The Never-Ending Days of Being Dead: Dispatches from the Front Line of Science
In Chown's most ambitious book to date he sets out to answer some of the most provocative questions of today:- Is Elvis alive and kicking in another space domain?- Will we ever find ET?- What's beyond the edge of the Universe?- Did aliens build the stars?- Can we live forever?
£12.99
Faber & Faber Scorsese on Scorsese
Now fully updated, Scorsese on Scorsese is the definitive study of America's foremost film director, including new chapters on Kundun, Bringing Out the Dead, the documentary My Voyage to Italy, and the epic Gangs of New York.True to its title, this book offers Martin Scorsese in his own words: through a career-length interview in which he recalls his upbringing in New York's Little Italy, and explains the inspiration and creation of his many great movies. The result is an incomparable insight into a body of work that is the most personal achievement in modern American cinema.Scorsese proves himself to be a terrifically articulate artist, whether recounting the many battles to get his movies made, his supreme passion for the medium of film itself, or the roots of his long-time creative partnership with actor Robert De Niro. Scorsese on Scorsese also contains a complete filmography, and a wealth of behind-the-scenes stills and sketches from Scorsese's own collection.
£17.09
Faber & Faber Istanbul
Istanbul, through the mind of its most celebrated writer. ** PRE-ORDER NIGHTS OF PLAGUE, THE NEW NOVEL FROM ORHAN PAMUK **Winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature'A declaration of love.' Sunday Times'A fascinating read for anyone who has even the slightest acquaintance with this fabled bridge between east and west.' The Economist'An irresistibly seductive book' Jan Morris, GuardianIn a surprising and original blend of personal memoir and cultural history, Turkey's most celebrated novelist, Orhan Pamuk, explores his home of more than fifty years.What begins as a portrait of the artist as a young man becomes a shimmering evocation, by turns intimate and panoramic, of one of the world's greatest cities. Beginning in the family apartment building where he was born, and still lives, Pamuk uses his family secrets to show how they were typical of their time and place. He then guides us through Istanbul's monuments and lost paradises, dilapidated Ottoman villas, back streets and waterways, and introduces us to the city's writers, artists and murderers.Like Joyce's Dublin and Borges' Buenos Aires, Pamuk's Istanbul is a triumphant encounter of place and sensibility, beautifully written and immensely moving.
£10.99
Faber & Faber Pilcrow
'Gripping.' New Statesman 'Compulsive.' Observer 'Strange and exhilarating.' Sunday Times 'A joy to read.' Sunday Telegraph 'Constantly surprising.' London Review of Books 'One of the most original comic creations in recent fiction.' Guardian Time passed slowly in the 1950s, especially if you'd been put to bed and told not to move (until further notice). But John Cromer, the central character of this extraordinary novel, is much closer to being an explorer than a victim. He's the weakest hero in fiction - unless he's one of the strongest. The first instalment of the semi-infinite Pilcrow sequence, this novel of capacious wit and style marks the opening chapter of the most memorable and enjoyable experiment in modern fiction. 'Pilcrow is a humdinger, a startling work that stands out against the monotonous field of contemporary British fiction as a genuine, almost miraculous oddity.' Metro
£12.99
Faber & Faber Thanksgiving
Anthony is a British journalist whose American wife, Lucy, has died suddenly. Haunted by her death, he becomes obsessed with her past and the years he missed before he met her. To find out more, he travels to a remote part of the Nevada desert to meet Lucy's first husband. Their encounter is the beginning of a journey that takes him across the world, to the edge of madness, and into the corners of the human heart. In this a drawn-out journey of bereavement, he discovers he is never far from the woman he still loves.If you enjoyed Thanksgiving you may also like Dirty Tricks, also by Michael Dibdin.
£9.99
Faber & Faber True Tales of American Life
Chosen by Paul Auster out of the four thousand stories submitted to his radio programme on National Public Radio, these 180 stories provide a wonderful portrait of America in the twentieth century. The requirement for selection was that each of the stories should be true, and each of the writers should not have been previously published. The collection that has emerged provides a richly varied and authentic voice for the American people, whose lives, loves, griefs, regrets, joys and sense of humour are vividly and honestly recounted throughout, and adeptly organised by Auster into themed sections. The section composed of war stories stretches as far back as the Civil War, still the defining moment in American history; while the sequence of 'Meditations' conclude the volume with a true and abiding sense of transcendence.The resultant anthology is both an enduring hymn to the strange everyday of contemporary American life and a masterclass in the art of storytelling.
£12.99