Showing results by publisher "Faber & Faber" in Literature & Fiction

This edition brings together A Scattering and Anniversary into a single book of lamentation and remembrance, its subject being Christopher Reid's wife, the actress Lucinda Gane, who died of cancer at the age of 55. A Scattering was first published in the UK in 2009 to wide acclaim, winning the Costa Book of the Year Award. This moving and fiercely self-reflective collection is divided into four poetic sequences.

Adopting a sunny, genial tone, Dunthorne lures the listener 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.

Catching a sudden look of defiance from his granddaughter inspires Hugo Williams to take up his pen and write this deeply moving new collection of poetry - the first since I Knew the Bride (2014), short-listed for the Forward and T. S. Eliot prizes. He navigates assuredly from thoughtful reminiscences of childhood and accounts of the war, through various climes and sensitively drawn relationships, to grim humour in the hospital ward and growing older with its attendant doubts and disappearances.

In 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....

In her fourth collection, Julia Copus explores the shifting balance of power between dangerous and destructive forces and things on the verge of becoming. Her deft and seductive poems reanimate lost figures and places from private moments and recast them in the open arena of the spoken word. Listening to this collection, one has the sense of encountering a series of filmic installations arranged by episode in a gallery.

The Built Moment is divided into two sections. The first, 'The Sea Is an Edge and an Ending', is a sequence of poems about her father's disappearance into Alzheimer's. It is not a narrative of illness so much as a meditation on the metaphysics of memory loss. What does it mean only to exist in the present, for your sense of self to come loose and for the past to float free? The second half of the book is called 'The Bluebell Horizontal'.

Enter, Fleeing is an enthralling new volume by one of the UK's most distinctive poets. The work gathered here displays Ford's power to amuse and startle, to move and disconcert. Some poems re-create moments from the poet's peripatetic childhood in Africa, America, Asia and the Gulf while others dramatise anarchic or violent encounters with a range of shadowy antagonists. Enter, Fleeing is without doubt this highly original poet's most eloquent and compelling collection to date.

Victoria Adukwei Bulley's debut collection, Quiet, circles around ideas of Black interiority, intimacy and selfhood, playing at the the tensions between the impulse to guard one's 'inner life' and the knowledge that, as Audre Lorde writes, 'your silence will not protect you'. The poems teem with grace and dignity, are artful in their shapes, sharp in their intelligence and possessing of a good ear, finely attuned to the sonics that fascinate and motivate the writing 'at the lower end of sound'.

The poems gathered here: elegies for the poet's musician father; tales of the love lives of gods and the childhoods of psychopaths; troubled encounters between men and women; odes to movies and the male anatomy; studies of art and ambition, politics and parenthood. Other voices enter the fray. And in the fourth part of Paterson's ongoing poem 'The Alexandrian Library', the poet-as-amateur scientist - from a weather station at the top of Ben Nevis to the cellar of The Arctic - bears witness to the imminence of man-made extinction.

Reid was born in Hong Kong and, thanks to the roving nature of his father's employment, spent some of his childhood in foreign places. Most of the locations in this book, however, are the Britain of the 1950s and '60s - perhaps, at this distance in time, no less exotic. As the poems move from pre-verbal experience to adolescence, the younger self is captured in scenes that illuminate the steps by which a man - a poet - has been raised.

The Floodmeadow draws us into a seething pastoral where lightning threatens and thunder gathers, pylons and powerlines hum, and steel-framed gates sing out into the wind. In these incantatory pieces, everything is present at once. This is a visionary collection that invokes other times, dimensions and soundscapes to tell out some word of beauty and abundance in the here and now.

For the last three decades Gary Younge has had a ringside seat during the biggest events and with the most significant personalities to impact the black diaspora: accompanying Nelson Mandela on his first election campaign, joining revellers on the southside of Chicago during Obama's victory, entering New Orleans days after hurricane Katrina or interviewing Archbishop Desmond Tutu, Maya Angelou and Stormzy. He has witnessed how much change is possible and the power of systems to thwart those aspirations.