Showing results by publisher "Faber & Faber" in All Categories

A Londoner for more than 20 years, moving from flat to Tube to air-conditioned office, Melissa Harrison knew what it was to be insulated from the seasons. Adopting a dog and going on daily walks helped reconnect her with the cycle of the year and the quiet richness of nature all around her: swifts nesting in a nearby church; ivy-leaved toadflax growing out of brick walls; the first blackbird's song; an exhilarating glimpse of a hobby over Tooting Common.

A woman on a plane listens to the stranger in the seat next to hers telling her the story of his life: his work, his marriage, and the harrowing night he has just spent burying the family dog. That woman is Faye, who is on her way to Europe to promote the book she has just published. Once she reaches her destination, the conversations she has with the people she meets - about art, about family, about politics, about love, about sorrow and joy, about justice and injustice - include the most far-reaching questions human beings ask.

As a pioneering female correspondent, she reported from Europe from the 1930s into the Second World War, watching 'the lights in the death-chamber go out one by one' from the frontline - always in the right place at the right time. Flinging off her heels under shellfire; meeting Hitler ('an inconspicuous little man') and the 'dapper' Mussolini; gossiping with Churchill by his goldfish pond or dancing in the bomb-blasted Ritz; reading The Intelligent Woman's Guide to Socialism on a Soviet train or eating reindeer with guerrilla skiers....

Volume one of the definitive collection of Seamus Heaney reading his own work, recorded in 2009 by RTE. Volume one contains four collections published between 1966 and 1975: Death of a Naturalist, Door into the Dark, Wintering Out and North.

In letters addressed to their friends, to members of their family - both biological and chosen - and to fellow storytellers, Akwaeke describes the shape of a life lived in overlapping realities. Through heartbreak, chronic pain, intimacy with death, becoming a beast, this is embodiment as a nonhuman: outside the boundaries imposed by expectations and legibility. This book is an account of the gruelling work of realignment and remaking necessary to carve out a future for oneself. The result is a black spirit memoir: a powerful, raw unfolding of identity.

Written by Anna Burns before she completed her dazzling Man Booker-winning novel Milkman, Mostly Hero is the hilarious, hell-raising descendant of Quentin Tarantino and the Brothers Grimm. Originally self-published online, it is available here in audio for the first time.

Rural Trinidad: a brick house on stilts surrounded by bush; a family, quietly surviving, just trying to live a decent life in a society. Clyde, the father, works long, exhausting shifts at the petroleum plant in southern Trinidad; Joy, his wife, looks after the home. Their two sons, 13 years old, wake early every morning to travel to the capital, Port of Spain, for school. They are twins but nothing alike: Paul has always been considered odd while Peter is widely believed to be a genius, destined for greatness. Paul goes walking in the bush one afternoon and doesn't come home....

A collection of Larkin's best-known poems, read by the poet. The Sunday Sessions consists of 26 poems, the contents of two tapes recorded by Philip Larkin in Hull in February 1980 - reportedly, each on a Sunday, after lunch with John Weeks, a sound engineer and colleague of the poet. The tapes contain work from Larkin's first major collection, The North Ship as well as poems from his best-known collections, The Whitsun Weddings and High Windows.

Casting light on the most serious of problems and at the same time saying not one serious sentence; being fascinated by the reality of the contemporary world and at the same time completely avoiding realism - that's The Festival of Insignificance. Listeners who know Kundera's earlier books know that the wish to incorporate an element of the "unserious" in a novel is not at all unexpected of him.

In America, in London, in Amsterdam, in Paris, revolutionary ideas fomenting since the late 1950s reached boiling point, culminating in a year in which the transient pop moment burst forth. Exploring the canonical figures, from The Beatles and Boty to Warhol and Reagan, 1966 delves deep into the social and cultural heart of the decade through masterfully compiled archival primary sources.

Dean Jocelin has a vision: that God has chosen him to erect a great spire on his cathedral. His mason anxiously advises against it, for the old cathedral was built without foundations. Nevertheless, the spire rises octagon upon octagon, pinnacle by pinnacle, until the stone pillars shriek and the ground beneath it swims. Its shadow falls ever darker on the world below, and on Dean Jocelin in particular.From the author of Lord of the Flies, The Spire is a dark and powerful portrait of one man's will, and the folly that he creates.

Blackpool, 1938. Miss Margaret Finch - a rather demure young woman - has just begun work in a position that relies on her discretion and powers of observation, when her path is crossed by the disgraced Rector of Stiffkey (aka Harold Davidson) who is the subject of a national scandal, and newspaper headlines. Margaret is determined to discover the truth about Davidson; is he a maligned hero or an exploiter of the vulnerable? But her own troubles are never far away, and Margaret's fear that the history is about to repeat itself means she needs to uncover the truth urgently.

Asa tries to give her classmate a biscuit. Nami evades her classmates' playground game of acorn-throwing. Happy decides she's not interested in doing anything other than lying down on her sofa. Each of these three stories begins in a reasonable place-but by the end you'll find yourself in another world altogether.

A delightful new recording of T. S. Eliot's beloved cat poems. Cats! Some are sane, some are mad and some are good and some are bad. Meet magical Mr. Mistoffelees, sleepy Old Deuteronomy and curious Rum Tum Tugger. But you'll be lucky to meet Macavity because Macavity's not there! In 1925, T. S. Eliot became codirector of Faber & Faber, who remain his publishers to this day.

From meditations on subway poetry and the temporal resonances of an empty Italian street, to considerations of the lives and work of Sigmund Freud, Constantine Cavafy, W. G. Sebald, John Sloan, Éric Rohmer, Marcel Proust and Fernando Pessoa, and portraits of cities such as Alexandria and St. Petersburg, Homo Irrealis is a deep reflection of the imagination's power to shape our memories under time's seemingly intractable hold.

Vicky is nine months pregnant and in prison. As the days slip by, she wrestles with the terrible knowledge that her baby will be taken away. Meanwhile her lawyer and his wife have moved to the country with their two children. Their arrival in the village sends ripples through a community that is to reevaluate the nature of family life, love, separation and death....

What do you do when you realise you have everything you think you've ever wanted but still feel completely empty? What do you do when it all starts to fall apart? The second volume of Moby's extraordinary life story is a journey into the dark heart of fame and the demons that lurk just beneath the bling and bluster of the celebrity lifestyle. In summer 1999, Moby released the album that defined the millennium, PLAY. Like generation-defining albums before it, PLAY was ubiquitous, and catapulted Moby to superstardom.

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.

Read by the author, Selected Poems 1968-2014 offers 45 years of work drawn from 12 individual collections by a poet who 'began as a prodigy and has gone on to become a virtuoso' (Michael Hofmann). Hailed by Seamus Heaney as 'one of the era's true originals', Muldoon seems determined to escape definition, yet this volume, chosen by the poet himself, serves as an indispensable introduction to his trademark combination of intellectual high jinx and emotional honesty.

Harper wakes every night, terrified of the sounds outside his hut halfway up the mountain in Bali. He is afraid that his past as a mercenary has caught up with him and that his life may now be in danger. As he waits to discover his fate, he meets Rita, a woman with her own tragic past, and begins a passionate affair. Their exile makes Harper realise that exile comes in many forms - but can Rita and Harper save each other while they are putting each other very much at risk?