Books published by Faber & Faber

Passing the Baton: Conducting in the 21st Century explores the ways in which gender, culture and socio-economic status influence a conductor's language, career, confidence and even their body. With her own personal story at the heart, leading conductor Alice Farnham interviews conductors - both men and women - at different stages in their career, looking at what it takes to become a conductor. Alice has set many women on a path to the profession, and her book gives a particular voice to female conductors, what it takes to succeed, and just what the job entails. This is not a handbook for conducting, though it describes the job to the layman. A book for all music lovers, professional musicians and anyone interested in leadership.

Hello there, meow, and how do you do?It's a joy to be sharing my story with you.It's all about friendship, fine music and art,And a busker named Pete . . .When Blanksy the cat discovers a talent for painting murals he uses it to draw bigger and bigger crowds to help his friend Pete the busker become rich. But will money really make Pete happy?A hilarious and heart-warming story with fabulous illustrations by award-winning illustrator Allen Fatimaharan.

FROM THE WINNER OF THE 2021 PULITZER PRIZE IN POETRYWhen My Brother Was an Aztec is a work of courage and invention - one that foregrounds the particularities of family dynamics and individual passion against the backdrop of Western mythologies and a deeply rooted cultural history. Natalie Diaz's arresting debut explores a brother's addiction and its devastating effects on a household, while offering a political critique of our nations and their pasts. It acknowledges absences and uncomfortable silences, as well as conjuring vivid voices and presences, from Antigone and Houdini to Huitzilopochtli and Jesus.Stolen cowboy boots, violins on fire; a mariachi band playing in the bathroom, a black bayonet carried between the shoulder blades; the beauty of busted fruit, the sight of hellish visions - Diaz both revels and reveals through her distinctive use of language and imagery, bringing to life every intimate and communal encounter, blooming abundance from scarcity. The result is a wrenching portrayal of sacrifice, want, despair and fortitude that feels truly transformative.

The biggest middle grade fantasy debut of 2022.Beware of the shadows, the Reaper King is coming . . .Mia always dreamed of being an umbra tamer until she met the wild creature on the Nightmare Plains. Since that day, she prefers to stay safe within the walls of Nubis. Safe, that is, until a surprise attack. With her parents captured, Mia's only hope is to travel to the City of Light to find help. But with only her little brother, two friends and one solitary tamed umbra, the journey feels impossible. Mia not only has to overcome her fears, she also has to learn to harness her umbra taming abilities if they are to complete the quest in time.For fans of Amari and the Night Brothers, The Legend of Podkin One-Ear and Nevermoor, this is the first in the sensational Umbra Tales series, illustrated by Ana Latese.'A fresh, wild, gripping adventure.' Kieran Larwood, author of The Legend of Podkin One-Ear'A thrilling, highly imaginative and action-packed fantasy with family at its heart.' Louie Stowell, author of Otherland and Loki: A Bad God's Guide to Being Good'Thrilling . . . a wonderful adventure.' L. D. Lapinski, author of The Strangeworlds Travel Agency

The first figure raises his crossbow, tilting his head to pinpoint the exact position of the thing in the bushes. It has stopped running now, and is muttering something. Some kind of prayer, a call for its mother, its father: anyone who might help it.Something sinister is going on in the stinking slums of London. Sideshow acts are going missing . . . men wearing animal masks and eye goggles are hunting them down and killing them for sport. But who are this fiendish Hunters' Club? And what is the reason for their cruel game?Sheba the wolfgirl and Pyewacket the witch's imp know all about life in a sideshow. But now they are the Carnival, private investigators working to help unusual people like them. Teaming up with new recruits half-cat Inji, her extraordinary brother, the armadillo-like Sil and Glyph the psychic, it's a race against time . . . to track down the mask-wearing villains, before anyone else comes to harm!

'Delightfully witty . . . Luminously intelligent . . . Odysseus Abroad has placed itself, with erudition and playfulness, on the map of modernism.' Guardian1985: twenty-two year old Ananda is a student adrift in Thatcher's Britain, homesick and isolated. His eccentric uncle, Radhesh, is a magnificent failure and an eccentric virgin who has lived in genteel impoverishment in Hampstead for nearly three decades. Over the course of one day, Odysseus Abroad follows the two isolated men on one of their weekly forays, gradually revealing the background to the two men's lives with deft precision and humour as they traverse London together, circling around their respective pasts and futures, and finding in one another an unspoken solace.

A beguiling, short and yet sweeping prose-poem, Afternoon Raag is the account of a young Bengali man studying at Oxford University and caught in complicated love triangle. His loneliness and melancholy sharpen his memories of home, which come back to haunt him in vivid, sensory detail. Intensely moving, superbly written, Afternoon Raag is a testimony to the clash of the old and the new; arrivals and departures.With an introduction by James Wood

On EVERY PAGE you will find:Guaranteed laughs! Stylish two-colour illustrations!General PANDAmonium! Lin the panda is on a mission: to find her best friend, Fu. He's disappeared from the zoo! Has he been stolen by the Horrid Human? Only her badness can help her find him . . . Luckily this panda is as fearless as she is fluffy! Just don't call her 'cute' . . .

Serge Diaghilev was the Russian impresario who is often said to have invented the modern art form of ballet. Commissioning such legendary names as Nijinsky, Fokine, Stravinsky, and Picasso, this intriguingly complex genius produced a series of radically original art works that had a revolutionary impact throughout the western world.Off stage and in its wake came scandal and sensation, as the great artists and mercurial performers involved variously collaborated, clashed, competed while falling in and out of love with each other on a wild carousel of sexual intrigue and temperamental mayhem. The Ballets Russes not only left a matchless artistic legacy - they changed style and glamour, they changed taste, and they changed social behaviour.The Ballets Russes came to an official end after many vicissitudes with Diaghilev's abrupt death in 1929. But the achievements of its heroic prime had established a paradigm that would continue to define the terms and set the standards for the next. Published to mark the hundred and fiftieth anniversary of Diaghilev's birth, Rupert Christiansen - leading critic and self-confessed 'incurable balletomane' - presents this freshly researched and challenging reassessment of a unique phenomenon, exploring passionate conflicts and outsize personalities in a story embracing triumph and disaster.

An exceptionally thought-provoking look at music and identity from one of the world's leading singers.

Margaret walks us along the promenade, peeks into the baths and even dares a trip on the love boat in this, her first seaside summer season, on a path more dangerous than she could ever have imagined. Readers are loving The Misadventures of Margaret Finch:***** 'Fascinating.

A provocative and rousing essay collection from one of Europe's greatest writers. The people of Central Europe cannot be separated from European history;

The literary masterpiece of a major discovery in international literature - never before translated into English.

In Mars By 1980, David Stubbs charts the evolution of electronic music from the earliest mechanical experiments in the late nineteenth century, through to the familiar sounds of electronica, house and techno that we know today.

Handbags, hairspray and sensible shoes.The monarch - Liz.Her most powerful subject - Maggie.One believed there was no such thing as society. The other had vowed to serve it.Opening the clasp on the antipathy between two giants of the twentieth century, Handbagged by Moira Buffini premiered at the Tricycle Theatre in September 2013.

Best known as a fine composer, the twelfth-century German abbess Hildegard of Bingen was also a religious leader and visionary, a poet, naturalist and writer of medical treatises. This book paints a portrait of her extraordinary life against the turbulent medieval background of crusade and schism, scientific discovery and cultural revolution.

Discover the exciting and dangerous lives of spies and secret agents from Blue Peter Award-winning David Long and rising star Terri Po.

'Lines off' is a term used for lines spoken from the wings of a theatre, or off-camera in a film. 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'.

When 11-year-old Caitlin discovers a shrimp-like alien creature on the shores of her island home, she takes responsibility for teaching it about the world. Caitlin must leave home and travel across the country to try and convince Perijee to stop destroying everything before it's too late.

Drowned. Buried by sand. Decimated by plague. Plunged off a cliff.This is the forgotten history of Britain's lost cities, ghost towns and vanished villages: our shadowlands.'Shadowlands is so well researched, beautifully written and packed with interesting detail. Green is both historian and prophet, offering a warning we need to pay attention to . . . alarming and valuable.'CLAIRE TOMALIN'A beautiful book, truly original. Shadowlands is poetic history written with great literary flair, inqusitiveness, soul-searching and humanity . . . It is a marvellous achievement.'IAN MORTIMER, author of The Time Traveller's Guide to Medieval England'An exquisitely written, moving and elegiac exploration . . . a book to savour and cherish.'SUZANNAH LIPSCOMB'A haunting, lyrical tour around the lost places of Britain.'CHARLOTTE HIGGINS, author of Under Another SkyBritain's landscape is scarred with haunting and romantic remains; these shadowlands that were once filled with life are now just spectral echoes. Peering through the cracks of history, we find Dunwich, a medieval city plunged off a Suffolk cliff by sea storms; the lost city of Trellech unearthed by moles in the Welsh Marches; and the ghostly reservoir that is Capel Celyn, one of the few remaining solely Welsh-speaking villages, drowned by Liverpool City Council.Historian Matthew Green tells the extraordinary stories of how these places met their fate and probes the disappearances to explain why Britain looks the way it does today. Travelling across Britain, Green transports the reader to these places as they teeter on the brink of oblivion, vividly capturing the sounds of the sea clawing away row upon row of houses, the taste of medieval wine, or the sights of puffin hunting on the tallest cliffs in the country. We experience them in their prime, look on at their destruction and revisit their lingering remains later as they are mourned by evictees and reimagined by artists, writers and mavericks.By exploring the lost causes and dead ends of history - places lost to natural phenomena, war and plague, economic shifts and technological progress - the precariousness of our own towns and cities, of humanity, becomes clear. Shadowlands is a deeply evocative and dazzlingly original account of Britain's past. 'A haunting and miraculous work of resurrection, stinging in a perpetual present'.IAIN SINCLAIR, author of The Gold Machine'Superb. A beautifully written atlas of Ghost Britain, a summoning of places lost to memory, and a deft excavation of the void underlying myths of national identity.'WILLIAM ATKINS, author of Exiles

The un-put-downable sequel to the bestselling The Kind Worth Killing.

The book as a whole is an experimental-feeling yet unyielding love letter to precisely those kinds of questions.' Emma Specter, Vogue'While desire is, no doubt, this book's throbbing taxi, Millner's consistent modulation of tone and perspective safeguards the book from the claustrophobia of erotic quest.