Search results for ""Faber Faber""

people herehave becomethe peoplethey're pretending to be.'Sam Shepard's language is sparse and crystal clear. His words appear modest, but they have huge scope.'Wim WendersThis volume is the first collection of Sam Shepard's autobiographical fiction and poetry.It inspired the award-winning film, Paris, Texas.'Sam Shepard is the greatest U.S. playwright of his generation. Since 1964 he has mapped out a huge mythic territory...like Whitman, his is vast and contains multitudes, his plays soar over the empty tracts of the Midwest, celebrate the space, energy and naive optimism of the new-found lands.' Time Out

Read more less

**QUIETLY HOSTILE - THE HILARIOUS NEW BOOK FROM THE #1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLING AUTHOR - IS AVAILABE TO PRE-ORDER NOW**ONE OF STYLIST'S BEST NEW BOOKS FOR 2020'This is an unforgettable book.' Roxane Gay Meditations on the terror of love; tips for getting your disgusting meat carcass ready for some new, hot sex; a frank self-evaluation upon the occasion of one's 30th birthday; and, finally, the answer to the question on everyone's minds: Would dying alone really be so terrible? Blogger and comedian Samantha Irby covers it all with wit and honesty - and serves it with a side of Instagram frittata.

Read more less

'Lines off' is a term used for lines spoken from the wings of a theatre, or off-camera in a film. It was while Hugo Williams was out of circulation following transplant surgery that he wrote the poems for this new collection - the first since I Knew the Bride (2014), shortlisted for the Forward and T. S. Eliot prizes. From youthful days 'upside down in the Crazy Room, / rising and falling on the Haunted Swing', he takes us to distant countries, both actual and metaphorical; participates in the 'mortal pantomime' of the hospital ward with humorous frankness; and offers a percipient account of growing older, with all its attendant doubts and disturbances. Autobiographical, psychological, remedial, Lines Off heralds the return of this acclaimed poet, back to the stage of the page, offering us 'the performance of a lifetime'.

Read more less

From the Sunday Times bestselling author of Call Me by Your Name and Find Me, a memoir of an extraordinary life.'[A] mesmerizing portrait of a now vanished world. Aciman's story of Alexandria is the story of his own family, a Jewish family with Italian and Turkish roots that tied its future to Egypt and made its home there for three generations, only to find itself peremptorily expelled by the Government in the early 1960's. It is the story of a fractious clan of dreamers and con men and the emotional price they would pay for exile, the story of a young boy's coming of age and his memories of the city he loved in his youth.Writing in lucid, lyrical prose, Mr. Aciman does an exquisite job of conjuring up the daily rhythms and rituals of his family's life: their weekly trips to the movies, their daily jaunts to the beach, their internecine squabbles over everything from religion to money to the pronunciation of words. There are some wonderfully vivid scenes here, as strange and marvelous as something in Garcia Marquez, as comical and surprising as something in Chekhov.' Michiko Kakutani, New York TimesAciman's latest novel, Find Me, is now available for preorder in paperback.

Read more less

'Magnificent.' New York Times'Unforgettable.' Times Literary Supplement'Exquisite.' New YorkerFrom the Sunday Times bestselling author of Call Me by Your Name and Find Me, now available to preorder in paperback.From a youthful infatuation with a cabinet maker in a small Italian fishing village, to a passionate yet sporadic affair with a woman in New York, to an obsession with a man he meets at a tennis court, Enigma Variations charts one man's path through the great loves of his life. Paul's intense desires, losses and longings draw him closer, not to a defined orientation, but to an understanding that 'heartache, like love, like low-grade fevers, like the longing to reach out and touch a hand across the table, is easy enough to live down'.André Aciman casts a shimmering light over each facet of desire, to probe how we ache, want and waver, and ultimately how we sometimes falter and let go of the very ones we want the most. We may not know what we want. We may remain enigmas to ourselves and to others. But sooner or later we discover who we've always known we were.

Read more less

The figure of the young American poet living in Paris is familiar from Paul Auster's celebrated novels; here that character is realised in Auster's own stunningly accomplished verse. His penetrating and charged poetry resembles little else in recent American literature. This collection of his poems, translations, and composition notes from early in his career furnish yet further evidence of his literary mastery.Taut, densely lyrical and everywhere informed by a powerful and subtle music, this selection begins with the compact verse fragments of Spokes (written when Auster was in his early twenties) and Unearth, continues on through the more ample meditations of Wall Writing, Disappearances, Effigies, Fragments From the Cold, Facing the Music, and White Spaces, then moves further back in time to include Auster's revealing translations of many of the French poets who influenced his own writing - including Paul Eluard, André Breton, Tristan Tzara, Philippe Soupault, Robert Desnos and René Char - as well as the provocative and previously unpublished 'Notes From A Composition Book' (1967). An introduction by Norman Finkelstein connects biographical elements to a consideration of the work, and takes in Auster's early literary and philosophical influences. For those interested in Paul Auster's novels - the now-classic New York Trilogy or The Brooklyn Follies - this book is an invaluable opportunity to witness his early development. Powerful, sometimes haunting, cool, precise and limpid, this view from the past to the present will appeal to those unfamiliar with this aspect of Auster's work, as well as those already acquainted with his poetry. Readers will agree that Auster's grasp on language and the world around him is not only questioning, but mysterious and very human, perceptive, and deeply compelling

Read more less

It's not easy being the WORST at everything!Hack and Whack are the very worst Vikings in the village - until a fierce and stinky berserker moves in - NEXT DOOR!WILL the brand new school help the twins outwit this villain and his vicious dog, Muddy Butt?And will Twisty Pants, Dirty Ulf and Elsa Gold-Hair help vanquish this foul fiend?'As joyously anarchic as Horrid Henry.' Cressida Cowell'A great new series for early readers.' BookTrust'A wonderfully absurd, anarchic romp.' Sarah McIntyre'Immensely appealing to children of five and up.' Literary Review

Read more less

This viking duo will give Horrid Henry a run for his money!What if your parents WANTED you to behave badly?Set in the snowy fjords of a Viking kingdom, the terrible twins, Hack and Whack, are proud to be the best worst vikings. Nothing stops the marauding pair as they steal boats, loot a birthday party, track a troll and sail off to raid Bad Island with their friends Twisty Pants and Dirty Ulf.Well, almost nothing . . .With whip-smart dialogue, and accompanied by Dennis the Menace style anarchic cartoon imagery, this series is as sharp, funny and compelling as you would expect from the reigning Queen of Comedy.'As joyously anarchic as Horrid Henry . . . will have your children laughing out loud.' Cressida Cowell'A treat for kids. A wonderfully absurd, anarchic romp.' Sarah McIntyre

Read more less

WINNER OF THE GANDYS CHILDREN'S TRAVEL BOOK OF THE YEARMaya has to escape. She's on the run in a country she doesn't know and has no idea who to trust. Raul is escaping too - travelling back to his home where a terrible tragedy happened, ready to stir up trouble.When their paths collide in the middle of the jungle, the sparks begin to fly. As modern world corruption meets the magic and legends of ancient times, can Maya draw on her hidden light to find the way through to the truth?A book about light, about magic and belief, and about unlocking your own potential, from the critically acclaimed author of Fish Boy and The Boy Who Hit Play.'A nail bitingly tense and fast paced adventure. Exciting, inspiring and though provoking' Joy Court, LoveReading4Kids

Read more less

Dorothy Molloy was a star in the making when Faber prepared her debut Hare Soup (2004) for publication, before tragedy struck, and she died four days before advance copies arrived. With its distinctive and unsettling mix of comedy and complicity, dark humour and disturbance (a feminist burlesque that has seen her work christened as 'gurlesque'), Hare Soup stripped the veneer from the niceties of relations in family life and the Catholic church, turning its inventive and sexually charged gaze to corruption and abuse in our most private spaces. The book rightly won accolades and admirers, and was followed by a further, posthumous collection, Gethsemane Day (2006) that was prepared from typescript. The Poems of Dorothy Molloy gathers these two collections alongside her manuscript work, which appeared as Long-Distance Swimmer (Salmon, 2009), and the remaining body of unpublished material to present a complete edition of poems to meet the growing readership of this startling talent.

Read more less

One hundred years after his birth, W. S. Graham's words seem more awake than ever. His subtle exploration of the paradoxes of language, his passionate conviction of the importance of art and the love he expresses for the people and landscapes of his native Clydeside and adopted home of Cornwall attract more readers each year. In startlingly original poems, he celebrates family and friendship and probes the limits of our understanding of the world and our place in it. Graham's New Collected Poems (2004) marked a crucial point in the growth of his reputation, bringing together for the first time all the poems of his seven collections as well as some of the unpublished material that had come to light since his death in 1986. Now, as we honour his centenary, this New Selected Poems presents his best and most characteristic: from his epic seafaring masterpiece 'The Nightfishing' to the quirky metaphysics of 'Implements in their Places', as well as a selection of his early neo-romantic poems, which Graham himself believed were essential to a full understanding of his oeuvre, and some remarkable uncollected work. There is no better way to make the acquaintance of one of the greatest British poets of the twentieth century.

Read more less

If you enjoyed UNORTHODOX, you will be riveted by Rebekah Roberts . . .'An absolutely crackling, unputdownable mystery. I loved it.' GILLIAN FLYNNFresh out of journalism school, Rebekah Roberts is working for the New York Tribune, trying to make a name for herself. Assigned a story about the murder of a woman in Brooklyn, Rebekah finds a case from inside a closed, secretive Hasidic Jewish community - the same Brooklyn neighbourhood her estranged mother was brought up in.Shocked to discover that the victim is set to be buried without an autopsy, Rebekah knows there is a story to uncover, but getting to the truth won't be easy - in the cloistered world her mother rebelled against, it's clear she's not welcome, and everyone she meets has a secret to keep, most of all from an outsider.

Read more less

Wearily, I take the path to the river, there in the cool to fill my being with the sounds of my sister-being, to refresh myself in the modest scents of pigeonwood and mitzeerie, to let my gaze end in a tangle of monkey ropes and fern arches and the slowly descending leaves, and to find rest, all day long, all night long.A young slave girl accompanies her owner on an expedition into the African interior in search of a mythical city. In unfamiliar terrain, the party gets lost. One by one, our narrator's companions disappear, leaving her to take refuge in the hollow of a baobab tree. There, she finds the space and will to reflect upon her life's journey, telling her story to the boabab itself. This powerful fable, translated from Wilma Stockenström's original Afrikaans by Nobel Prize-winner J. M. Coetzee, is a remarkable portrait of dislocation and empowerment. It is also a brilliant insight into Coetzee's craft as a writer.

Read more less

The Armistice of 1918 brought ceasefire to the war on the Western Front, but 'the Great War' would not as hoped be 'the war to end all wars'. In this affecting selection, the Poet Laureate, Carol Ann Duffy, guides us deep into the act and root of 'armistice': its stoppage or 'stand' of arms, its search for truce and ceasefire. In 100 poems, our most cherished poets of the Great War speak alongside those from other conflicts and cultures, so that we hear some of the lesser-heard voices of war, including wives, families, those left behind. These poems of war and peace memorialise the horror and the tragedy of conflict. At the same time, in armistice, they become a record of renewal and a testimony to hope.

Read more less

ONE OF THE WHITE REVIEW'S BEST BOOKS OF 2019Elizabeth Hardwick's iconic essay collection Seduction and Betrayal is a radical portrait of women and literature, reissued with a new introduction by Deborah Levy.'Hardwick's sentences are burned in my brain.' - Susan SontagSidelined. Betrayed. Killed off. Elizabeth Hardwick dissects the history of women and literature. In her most virtuoso work of criticism, she explores the lives of the Brontës, Woolf, Eliot and Plath; the fate of literary wives such as Zelda Fitzgerald and Jane Carlyle; and the destinies of fictional heroines from Richardson's Clarissa to Ibsen's Nora. With fierce empathy and biting wit, Hardwick mines their childhoods, families, and personalities to probe the costs of sex, love, and marriage. Shattering the barrier between writing and life, she asks who is the seducer and who the seduced; who the victim and who the victor.First published in 1974, yet both urgently timely and timeless, Seduction and Betrayal explodes the conventions of the essay: and the result is nothing less than a reckoning.

Read more less

WINNER OF THE MICHAEL MURPHY MEMORIAL PRIZEPOETRY BOOK SOCIETY CHOICEIn the language of fan fiction, a 'Mary Sue' is an idealised and implausibly flawless character: a female archetype that can infuriate audiences for its perceived narcissism.Such is the setting for this brilliant and important debut by Sophie Collins. In a series of verse and prose collages, Who Is Mary Sue? exposes the presumptive politics behind writing and readership: the idea that men invent while women reflect; that a man writes of the world outside while a woman will turn to the interior.Part poetry and part reportage, at once playful and sincere, these fictive-factive miniatures deploy original writing and extant quotation in a mode of pure invention. In so doing, they lift up and lay down a revealing sequence of masks and mirrors that disturb the reflection of authority.A work of captivation and correction, this is a book that will resonate with anyone concerned with identity, shame, gender, trauma, composition and culture: everyone, in other words, who wishes to live openly and think fearlessly in the modern world. Who Is Mary Sue? is a work for our times and a question for our age: it is a handbook for all those willing to reimagine prescriptive notions of identity and selfhood.

Read more less

'A superb, highly original thriller . . . I loved it.' Peter James'Matches Grisham at his best.' Sunday TimesActor Tommy Jump isn't getting the roles he once did. But as he prepares to give up the stage he gets a call from the FBI, with an offer too lucrative to refuse. For $300,000 all Tommy has to do is spend six months in prison, acting as a failed bank robber and befriend a fellow inmate who has information which could take down a Mexican drug cartel. But when the stakes are this high, does Tommy have what it takes to get away with this audacious last act?

Read more less

Another exciting adventure by the hilarious Harry Hill - this time taking Matt Millz and the team to the Edinburgh Festival!Matt's dream of becoming a stand-up comic is fading. Six months on from his success at the Apollo, the gigs have dried up, and it's back to the daily drudge of schoolwork for Matt and his pals. But then his twelve-year-old manager Kitty has a brainwave: if they can persuade their teachers to take a school play up to the Edinburgh Festival, they could hold a comedy night too.But Matt's got a rival new school-mate Jamie who is pushing to be in the comedy line-up. And Jamie is good. But is he too good to be true?Packed with action, clever twists and great characters, this third Matt Millz adventure will appeal to every aspiring young comedian.

Read more less

This is the story of Dunkirk and of the men who planned it (insofar as it was planned) and of the men who carried it out, and of their ships. Mr Divine, who was himself with the small boats, writes with the authority of direct knowledge. He had the assistance of the men who were intimately concerned with planning and organising the operation. This is the true story of Dunkirk from its almost nebulous beginnings to the astonishing triumph of its end.

Read more less

O Positive is the long-awaited debut collection of poetry from Joe Dunthorne, and it has all the appeal of his widely acclaimed fiction. Adopting a sunny, genial tone, Dunthorne lures the reader to darker places, exploring death and dread, failure and regret - the 'lounge of our suffering'. Often, he catches us off-guard: a 'whiplash' effect where poems shift from laughter to slaughter in a moment. Impertinent owls, an immersive theatre troupe, ancient men from the Great War and idiot balloonists - such characters dramatise our human fancies and foibles, joining the protagonist in scenarios both humorously bizarre and all-too-familiar. These performances serve to probe and unpeel the layers of the self - all the way down to the raw.

Read more less

Thom Jones's magnificent collection of stories presents a brutal and authentic vision of the human condition, in a world without mercy or redemption. The Pugilist at Rest gives us an America of Vietnam vets and ex-boxers, of bitter lovers in trailer parks, of lives passing in brilliant epileptic flickers. These ferocious, semi-autobiographical stories form the debut collection by a distinctive and hugely talented writer. Thom Jones was discovered as a writer relatively late in life, in his forties, by the fiction editors at the New Yorker, who published many of Jones's stories from the early 1990s onwards. The title story of this collection went on to win the O. Henry Award for Best Short Story.

Read more less

Ever since her sister, Agnes, died, Pearl has a tradition every time it snows. She makes a person out of snow. A snow sister. It makes Christmas feel a little less lonely.On Christmas Eve, her father receives a letter about a long-lost relative's will. Is their luck about to change? In anticipation of a better Christmas, Pearl goes to beg credit at Mr Noble's grocery to get ingredients for a Christmas pudding. But she is refused, and chased down the street where she is hit by a hansom cab. The snow is falling so hard that they can't take her home. She'll have to stay at Flintfield Manor overnight, in a haunted room... Will Pearl make it home for Christmas?

Read more less

NEW AND UPDATED EDITIONA magisterial and profoundly perceptive survey of Britain's post-war role on the global stage, from Suez to Brexit. 'The fullest long-run political and diplomatic narrative yet of Britain's fateful, tragi-comic road to Brexit.' DAVID KYNASTON'An instant classic . . . Stephens is a master of historical codebreaking.' PETER HENNESSEYAward-winning Financial Times journalist Philip Stephens paints a fascinating portrait of sixty years - from Suez to Brexit - as Britain struggles to reconcile its waning power with its past glory. Drawing on decades of personal contact and interviews with senior politicians and diplomats in Britain, the United States and across the capitals of Europe, Britain Alone is a magisterial and deeply perceptive history of our nation and how we arrived at the state we are in.'Commanding . . . Rarely if ever, in the history of the British state since 1707, has one half of Britain's ruling elite committed an act of policy viewed with such absolute contempt by the other half; and rarely has that contempt been expressed with such elegance, such fluency, and such a devastating wealth of supporting detail, as in this mighty survey.' SCOTSMAN'Profoundly knowledgeable.' CHRIS PATTEN'Compelling.' LAWRENCE FREEDMAN'A fascinating history.' IRISH TIMES'A magnificent, exhilarating book' PROSPECT

Read more less

I had been shot. A bullet in my back. I fell. Where did I fall? I fell from a great height, it seemed, into a painting in a gallery in a great City. I found myself returning across centuries and generations to the end of my age. I had been caught by the Artist in what seemed the womb of unexpected being in which one becomes sensitive to the end one has reached and to a new beginning. It was an end, it was a new beginning one was called upon to probe and discover.We may dream, while still alive, of dying. But the dream is soon forgotten as are the edges and corners of a re-lived life of which we dream. It is buried in the unconscious. We know that life fades into death but, in what degree, does life re-live itself as it dreams of dying?The Ghost of Memory is a novel about life and death or rather - to put it somewhat differently - about the close, almost indefinable cross-culturalities between moments of life and death. This is played out through a man who is mistakenly shot as a terrorist - he sees himself

Read more less

Two women wash up on a distant shore following a violent boating accident. Dazed by their experience, they look for a path home. But they discover that this unfamiliar land is not what it seems - and that, though they may be together, they have never been further apart.Unflinchingly honest and tenderly lyrical, Meet Me at Dawn is a modern fable exploring the triumph of everyday love, the mystery of grief, and the temptation to become lost in a fantasy future that will never be.Meet Me at Dawn by Zinnie Harris premiered at the Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh, in August 2017.

Read more less

A 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 accomplished and intricately plotted story.'-JON McGREGOR'A Lonely Man is a delicate snare of a novel.'-BRANDON TAYLOR'A thrilling, unnerving novel. a page-turner with exacting syntax and emotional heft.'-CATHERINE LACEY

Read more less

'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 . . .

Read more less

Guilty or not guilty? Enter the courtroom, hear the evidence, make your judgement.A hijacked plane is heading towards a packed football stadium. Ignoring orders to the contrary, a fighter pilot shoots down the plane killing 164 people to save 70,000.Put on trial and charged with murder, the fate of the pilot is placed in the audience's hands.Ferdinand von Schirach's Terror, in a translation by David Tushingham, received its UK Premiere at the Lyric Hammersmith, London, in June 2017.

Read more less

I spy a cloud go floating byWhere do you go, Cloud, so high?To the seaShe singsWhere the wild gulls flyThen catch me if you canI cryWe race each other to the seaCan''t catch me, CloudCan't catch meA boy and a dog follow a cloud out to sea, but as the weather worsens he relies on the whales and waves to bear him home.

Read more less

Andrew Motion's prose memoir In the Blood (2006) was widely acclaimed, praised as an act of magical retrieval and a hymn to familial love. Now, over a decade later and after moving to live and work in the United States, Motion looks back once more to recreate a stunning biographical sequel - but this time in verse. Essex Clay rekindles, expands and gives a tragic resonance to subjects that have haunted the poet throughout his writing life. In the first part, he tells the story of his mother's riding accident, long unconsciousness and slow death; in the second, he remembers the end of his father's life; and in the third, he describes an encounter that deepens the poem's tangled themes of loss and memory and retrieval. Although the prevailing mood of the poem has a sweeping Tennysonian melancholy, its wealth of physical details and its narrative momentum make it as compelling as a fast-paced novel: a settling of accounts which admits that final resolutions are impossible.

Read more less

SHORTLISTED FOR THE EDGE HILL SHORT STORY PRIZE 2019LONGLISTED FOR THE RATHBONES FOLIO PRIZE 2019Mothers is peopled by men and women who find themselves at crossroads or dead ends - characters who search without knowing what they seek. From remote and wild Exmoor to ancient Swedish burial sites and hedonistic Mexican weddings, these stories lay bare the emotional and psychic damage of life and love in a stunning debut collection.

Read more less

'I love these books ... the best books ever. Brilliant' Chris Evans The sixth book in the bestselling series brings bizarre, astonishing, conversation-starting facts from the clever clogs at the hugely popular BBC quiz show QI. Did you know that: Iceland imports ice cubes. A group of ladybirds is called a loveliness. It is illegal in Saudi Arabia to name a child Sandi. Eight billion particles of fog can fit into a teaspoon. People who read books live longer than people who don't. Prince Philip was born on a kitchen table in Corfu. No human beings have ever had sex in space. Netfiix's biggest competitor is sleep. Mice sigh up to 40 times an hour.

Read more less

Longlisted 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.

Read more less

Leonid Eitingon was a KGB killer who dedicated his life to the Soviet regime. He was in China in the early 1920s, in Spain during the Civil War, and, crucially, in Mexico when Trotsky was assassinated. 'As long as I live,' Stalin had said, 'not a hair of his head shall be touched.' It did not work out like that.Max Eitingon was a psychoanalyst: a colleague, friend and protégé of Freud's. He was rich, secretive and - through his friendship with a famous Russian singer - implicated in the abduction of a white Russian general in Paris in 1937.Motty Eitingon was a New York fur dealer whose connections with the Soviet Union made him the largest trader in the world. Imprisoned by the Bolsheviks, and questioned by the FBI in a state of Cold War paranoia: was Motty everybody's friend or everybody's enemy?Mary-Kay Wilmers began exploring the history of her remarkable family twenty years ago. The result is a book of astonishing scope and thrilling originality which throws light into some of the darkest corners of the last century.

Read more less

The epic second novel from the CWA John Creasey New Blood Dagger-shortlisted and Shamus-nominated author of Fever CityMexico - Ciudad Real is in crisis: the economy is in meltdown, a new war between rival cartels is erupting, and a serial killer is murdering hundreds of female workers. Fuentes, the detective in charge of the investigation, suspects that most of his colleagues are on the payroll of his chief suspect, narco kingpin, El Santo. If he's going to stop the killings, he has to convince fiery union activist, Pilar, to ignore all her instincts and work with him. But in a city eclipsed by murder, madness and magic, can she really afford to trust him?

Read more less

* A Financial Times Book of the Year *'What does a conductor do? It may be a favourite joke among the musicians in an orchestra, but Wigglesworth wants to find a more thoughtful answer. Avoiding jargon, he analyses what he has discovered during 30 years in the job.' Financial Times, Books of the Year A conductor is one of classical music's most recognisable but misunderstood figures, attracting so many questions:'Surely orchestras can play perfectly well without you? ''Do you really make any difference to the performance?''Are the musicians even watching you?'The Silent Musician is not a manual for conductors, nor a history of conducting. It is for all who wonder what conductors actually do, and why they matter.

Read more less

I 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 country losing its innocence.

Read more less

Dad suggests a sherry 'To keep us both going', in the cosy front room with the firelight glowing ...Then out comes the Baileys. And mum hits the rum. Hours of merriment and a stocking-clad tango later, they drift off to sleep - the living room in disarray, the presents unwrapped and their careful Christmas preparations in ruins. But come morning it seems a mysterious visitor has saved the day . This tipsy twist on the nation's favourite festive poem is the perfect gift for harassed parents everywhere.

Read more less

Sinclair; The Sisters; Swallows; The Rockingham Shoot; The Power of DarknessJohn McGahern, the leading Irish novelist of his generation, wrote a substantial number of compelling scripts for radio and television. This volume brings together five of his produced works, at the heart of which sits the previously unpublished The Rockingham Shoot, a dark and powerful play for television that concerns a Nationalist teacher whose attempt to prevent his pupils beating at a pheasant shoot held in honour of the British Ambassador leads to a shockingly violent incident. Collectively, these dramatic works offer an evocative and often stark account of a deeply troubled and divided nation.

Read more less

Scooters, scooters everywhere . . .Do YOU have one? Do you dare?From the illustrator of the award winning Barry Loser series and the author of Where the Wild Mums Are, comes this hilarious picture book, the first EVER about scooters. Drawn in Jim's trademark style this is sure to be a hit with all young scooter riders.

Read more less

Winner of the Shamus Award for Best PI Hardcover novel 2019 'This is the second novel to feature the private investigator Roxane Weary, who's a wonderful character. Lepionka is such an assured writer, with complete narrative authority from the first line.' Sophie HannahShaken by the outcome of her last big case, PI Roxane Weary is keeping a low profile. When she takes on a new client who suspects his fiancée is cheating on him, Roxane is happy to have landed a run-of-the-mill surveillance job. Until, that is, Marin Strasser, the woman she's been tailing, turns up dead.The police are convinced her client is the one who pulled the trigger. Certain - and scared - that things aren't so straightforward, Roxane starts to follow a paper trail that gets more dangerous the farther it goes. So who really was Marin Strasser? Who could have wanted her dead? And how can Roxane stop her work from once again pushing away the few people she thinks she can trust?

Read more less

In this masterful novel by the acclaimed Indian writer Vivek Shanbhag, a close-knit family is delivered from near-destitution to sudden wealth after a miraculous change in fortune. As the narrator, along with his sister, his parents, and his uncle move from a cramped shack to a larger house and encounter new-found wealth, the family dynamics begin to shift. As the dream of middle-class, aspirational living comes true, allegiances and desires realign; marriages are arranged and begin to falter; and conflict brews ominously in the background.

Read more less

The shadow of a tree in upstate New York. A hotel room in Switzerland. A young stranger in the Congo. In Blind Spot, readers will follow Teju Cole's inimitable artistic vision into the visual realm, as he continues to refine the voice and intellectual obsessions that earned him such acclaim for Open City. In more than 150 pairs of images and surprising, lyrical text, Cole explores his complex relationship to the visual world through his two great passions: writing and photography. Blind Spot is a testament to the art of seeing by one of the most powerful and original voices in contemporary literature.

Read more less

When night falls my bed is an air balloon.I sail through the slipsiverse, close by the moon.I float above treetops where fluttertufts are sleepingAnd flowering hills where the whifflepigs go creeping;Ponds strung with starlight that glitter like glass,A floog with her velvet nose bent to the grass. Such treasures I spy on! My bed in the treesSwings me up high, like a circus trapeze.Now the cool, night-rustling airSlips through my finger-gaps, ripples my hair; Now we glide over water, the moon's silver lightBlown by a cloudpuff into the bight,Adrift on the sea where the dream-shapes float;When night falls my bed is a sailing boat.A beautifully presented picture book with two front covers, the text can be read from front to back and vice versa. The mirror form poem meets in the middle in a stunning centrepiece image as the two children in the story (twins, one in an air balloon, the other a sailing boat) meet in the clouds!

Read more less

Daddy, would you like a sandwich, with all your favourite things . . . ? Join one little girl on her quest to make her father the perfect sandwich, whether he likes it or not . . . You're in for a wicked surprise!From Squishy McFluff author Pip Jones and bright new talent Laura Hughes, this is a brilliantly funny board book perfect for ages 1+.

Read more less

Grumble grumble went Dozy's tummy. He was hungry! 'I'll go and find some FOOD,' Dozy decided, and off he trotted into the woods. And that's how his adventure began!The curious little Dozy Bear learns the secret of food in this innovative, thoughtful picture book which encourages youngsters to try something new . . . Dozy is hungry, but he doesn't like the food that Mama and Papa bear like. He only wants fish! But can a food adventure with the other animals in the forest change his mind? This charming story gently introduces the idea that trying new foods can be fun - perfect for any parent who has ever struggled at dinnertime.

Read more less

'The most popular English poet since Larkin.' Sunday TimesAfter more than a decade and following his celebrated adventures in drama, translation, travel writing and prose poetry, Simon Armitage's eleventh collection of poems heralds a return to his trademark contemporary lyricism. The pieces in this multi-textured and moving volume are set against a backdrop of economic recession and social division, where mass media, the mass market and globalisation have made alienation a commonplace experience and where the solitary imagination drifts and conjures. The Unaccompanied documents a world on the brink, a world of unreliable seasons and unstable coordinates, where Odysseus stalks the aisles of cut-price supermarkets in search of direction, where the star of Bethlehem rises over industrial Yorkshire, and where alarm bells for ailing communities go unheeded or unheard. Looking for certainty the mind gravitates to recollections of upbringing and family, only to encounter more unrecoverable worlds, shaped as ever through Armitage's gifts for clarity and detail as well as his characteristic dead-pan wit. Insightful, relevant and empathetic, these poems confirm The Unaccompanied as a bold new statement of intent by one of our most respected and recognised living poets. 'A writer who has had a game-changing influence on his contemporaries.' Guardian'Armitage is that rare beast: a poet whose work is ambitious, accomplished and complex as well as popular.' Sunday Telegraph'The best poet of his generation.' Craig Raine, Observer

Read more less

Shortlisted for the T. S. Eliot Prize for Poetry The Noise of a Fly is the first collection from Douglas Dunn in sixteen years, and the first since he was awarded the Queen's Gold Medal for Poetry in 2013. It is a book brimming with warmth, mischief and a self-deprecating humour, as well as with a charming, 'Larkinesque' crankiness: a quarrel with ageing, an impatience with youth, the grievousness of losing friends and colleagues. But for all its intimate, hearthside rumination, this is a volume of poems that looks outward in equal measure: at Scottish independence, British politics and an international refugee crisis, and reflects unflinchingly on what it is to consider oneself a contributor to society. Penned with a dexterous wit and a steady nerve, The Noise of a Fly is a mesmeric imagining of our later years by one of this country's most senior and celebrated writers.'It is hard to think of many poets who can equal his combination of imaginative ambition, formal resource and range of tone . . . Written on these terms, poetry is a matter of permanent urgency.' Sean O'Brien'The most respected Scottish poet of his generation.' Nicholas Wroe

Read more less