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

After fleeing Chicago to quarantine at home in Michigan, Irby finds herself bleaching groceries and wondering if her upper lip hairs are visible on Zoom. Her career reaches new heights: she gets to work with the iconic ladies of Sex and the City - her dream! - but behind the new-found glam, Irby is just trying to keep her life together. Our friend in print is back, on point, and ready to take us with her, from adopting Abe (her scrawny, watery-eyed firstborn dog) to her favourite, extremely specific porn searches (including two old nuns).

Aftermath chronicles this perilous journey as the author redefines herself as a single woman and creates a new version of family life for her daughters. She discovers previously unknown strengths and freedoms but also finds herself suddenly vulnerable to outsiders, unwelcome advice, social displacement and the absence of a clear authority. The pressure to reconstruct a 'normal' life for her daughters competes with the sense that nothing feels normal at all. 

A woman invites a famed artist to visit the remote coastal region where she lives, in the belief that his vision will penetrate the mystery of her life and landscape. Over the course of one hot summer, his provocative presence provides the frame for a study of female fate and male privilege, of the geometries of human relationships and of the struggle to live morally between our internal and external worlds.

Sometime religious outsider and social disaster, sometime celebrity preacher and establishment darling, John Donne was incapable of being just one thing. He was a scholar of law, a sea adventurer, an MP, a priest, the Dean of St Paul's Cathedral—and perhaps the greatest love poet in the history of the English language. He converted from Catholicism to Protestantism, was imprisoned for marrying a high-born girl without her father's consent, struggled to feed a family of 10 children and was often ill and in pain.

Swiv has taken this advice too literally. Now she's suspended from school, in the care of her foul-mouthed, hilarious grandmother. Mom is busy being pregnant, so Grandma gives Swiv a very different education. Swiv learns maths with Amish jigsaws and How to Dig a Winter Grave. Grandma's methods may be unorthodox, but she has faced the worst of life with a wild, independent spirit and this is what she hopes to pass on. Time is running short. Grandma's health is failing and the baby is on the way—can Grandma inspire this fire in Swiv, and ensure it never goes out?

One afternoon, a mother opens her front door to find the length of her son's body stretched out on the veranda, swaddled in akwete material, his head on her welcome mat. The Death of Vivek Oji transports us to the day of Vivek's birth, the day his grandmother Ahunna died. It is the story of an over protective mother and a distant father and the heart-wrenching tale of one family's struggle to understand their child, just as Vivek learns to recognise himself.

When spring comes, the people leave their winter cave, foraging for honey and shoots, bulbs and grubs, the hot richness of a deer's brain. They awaken the fire to heat their naked bodies, lay down their thorn bushes and share pictures in their minds. But strange things are happening - inexplicable scents, sounds and violence - and, suddenly, unimaginable creatures are half-glimpsed in the forest: an upright new people of bone-faces and deerskins. What the early people don't know is that their season is already over.... 

Ash Woods isn't supposed to perform alchemy - he'll be arrested if anyone ever finds out. But when he's caught by the condescending Ramsay Thorne, instead of handing him over to the reds, Ramsay blackmails Ash into helping with a dangerous personal mission: finding the legendary Book of Source, said to make its reader an all-powerful alchemist. As Ash and Ramsay work together, their feelings for each other grow. But, Ash must discover his own power and find out how far other alchemists are willing to go to get it.

Felix Love has never been in love - and, yes, he's painfully aware of the irony. He desperately wants to know what it's like and why it seems so easy for everyone but him to find someone. What's worse is that, even though he is proud of his identity, Felix also secretly fears that he's one marginalisation too many - Black, queer and transgender - to ever get his own happily-ever-after. When an anonymous student begins sending him transphobic messages, Felix comes up with a plan for revenge. What he didn't count on: his catfish scenario landing him in a quasi-love triangle.

To write about Tony Wilson, a.k.a. Anthony H. Wilson, is to write about a number of public and private characters and personalities, a clique of unreliable narrators, constantly changing shape and form. At the helm of Factory Records and the Haçienda, Wilson unleashed landmark acts such as Joy Division and New Order into the world as he pursued myriad other creative endeavours, appointing himself a custodian of Manchester's legacy of innovation and change.

In 1975, Viv Albertine was obsessed with music, but it never occurred to her she could be in a band, as she couldn't play an instrument, and she'd never seen a girl play electric guitar. A year later, she was the guitarist in the hugely influential all-girl band the Slits, who fearlessly took on the male-dominated music scene and became part of a movement that changed music. A raw, thrilling story of life on the frontiers and a candid account of Viv's life post-punk - taking in a career in film, the pain of IVF, illness and divorce and the triumph of making music again - Clothes, Clothes, Clothes. Music, Music, Music. Boys, Boys, Boys. is a remarkable memoir. 

In the tempestuous summer of 2005, on a day that is as hot as the inside of a bovine, a 14-year-old farmer's daughter makes friends with the local veterinarian who looks after her father's cows. He has reached 'the biblical age of seven times seven' and is trying to escape trauma, while she is trying to escape into a world of fantasy. Their obsessive reliance on each other's stories builds into a terrifying trap, with a confession at the heart of it that threatens to rip their small Dutch community apart.

Milan Kundera is a master of graceful illusion and illuminating surprise. In one of these stories a young man and his girlfriend pretend that she is a stranger he picked up on the road - only to become strangers to each other in reality as their game proceeds. In another a teacher fakes piety in order to seduce a devout girl, then jilts her and yearns for God. In yet another girls wait in bars, on beaches and on station platforms for the same lover, a middle-aged Don Juan who has gone home to his wife.

December, 1989, and Ashley Smith - a bright-eyed American studying in London - has unexpectedly been invited by her classmate Emma Chapman to spend Christmas at her family's Cotswolds manor house, Starvewood Hall. The holiday is a true English fantasy: woodland walks, charming pubs and elaborate dinners at the manor, with the added romantic potential of Emma's twin brother, Adam, who feels like Ashley's wildest dreams come true. But is there something strange about the old house, both stately and rundown.

This is a meditation on the power of creative connection. Drawing on 20 years' experience as a writer and performer, Kae Tempest explores how and why creativity - however we choose to practise it - can cultivate greater self-awareness and help us establish a deeper relationship to ourselves and the world. Honest, tender and written with piercing clarity, On Connection is a call to arms that speaks to a universal yet intimate truth.

In the wake of her family's collapse, a writer and her two young sons move to London. The upheaval is the catalyst for a number of transitions - personal, moral, artistic and practical - as she endeavours to construct a new reality for herself and her children. In the city, she is made to confront aspects of living that she has, until now, avoided and to consider questions of vulnerability and power, death and renewal, in what becomes her struggle to reattach herself to and believe in life.

In 1962 the American statesman Dean Acheson famously charged that Britain had lost an empire and failed to find a new role. Nearly 60 years later the rebuke rings true again. Britain's postwar search for its place in the world has vexed prime ministers and government since the nation's great victory in 1945: the cost of winning the war was giving up the empire. After the humiliation of Anthony Eden's Suez expedition, Britain seemed for a time to have found an answer.

When Dublin pathologist Quirke glimpses a familiar face while on holiday with his wife, it's hard, at first, to tell whether his imagination is just running away with him. Could she really be who he thinks she is, and have a connection with a crime that nearly brought ruin to an Irish political dynasty? Unable to ignore his instincts, Quirke makes a call back home, and Detective St John Strafford is soon dispatched to Spain. But he's not the only one on route: as a terrifying hitman hunts down his prey, they are all set for a brutal showdown.

As the spring warmth melts the ice, divers search the wreckage at the bottom of the Ångermanland River - but the murdered man they recover was put there much more recently than the historic artefacts they were seeking. Local Detective Eira Sjödin, newly pregnant and not talking about it, is proud to be put in charge of the investigation - until she discovers the man's identity, and the evidence begins to point towards her own family.

Set in London, the seventh Adam Dalgliesh mystery from the best-selling author of Death Comes To Pemberley is a compulsive thriller and a chilling study of the complex motives behind cold-hearted murder.