Books published by Faber & Faber

A classic picture of the rural past in a remote Suffolk village, revealed in the conversations of old people who recall harvest customs, home crafts, poetic usages in dialect, old farm tools, smugglers' tales, and rural customs and beliefs going back to the time of Chaucer.

Funny, touching and real, this second collection of Alan Bennett's classic work for television from the late 1970s and early 1980s is full of fine observations of life as it is lived.

This novel is set in Paris in 1944 when the withdrawal of the occupying forces plunged the city into moral and physical chaos. Genet's other works include "Miracle of the Rose", "Querelle of Brest", "Our Lady of the Flowers" and "The Thief's Journal".

This educational edition, with the full play text and an introduction to the playwright, features a detailed analysis of the language, structure and characters of the play, and textual notes explaining difficult words and references.

A cultural history of drugs. Plant explores the influence of drugs on contemporary culture and how they have shaped some of the modern era's fundamental philosophies. The author examines writing on drugs by authors such as Coleridge on opium, Freud on cocaine and Michaux on mescaline.

What if you were middle-aged and were offered the chance to trade in your sagging flesh for a much younger and more pleasing model? This is the situation in which one character in this collection of stories finds himself. Taking the plunge, he embarks on an odyssey of hedonism but soon has regrets.

Captured by Christian pirates in the Mediterranean and imprisoned by the pope, then released, baptized, and allowed a European life of scholarship as the Christian writer Giovanni Leone, Al-Hasan al-Wazzan - or Leo Africanus - is a celebrated but hitherto elusive figure.

This is a definitive edition of Lowell's poems, from the early triumph of "Lord Weary's Castle", winner of the Pulitzer Prize, to the wilfulness of his "Imitations" of Sappho, Baudelaire, Rilke and other masters, to the spontaneity of his "History" and "The Dolphin", winner of another Pulitzer.

The outline of the story is well known - has become, in fact, the stuff of legend: the archetypal life of the tortured genius, critically spurned and dying young. What Andrew Motion brings to bear on the subject is a deep understanding of how Keats fitted into the intellectual and political life of his time.

From the trembling new-born calf in Season Songs to the gently sleeping one recorded in Moortown Diary, animal life as observed in the pages of Flowers and Insects, Elmet, River, Lupercal and Hawk in the Rain is seen afresh through the diversity and imaginative energy of this collected volume.

A young man is brutally assaulted in an underground train. Beaten unconscious, he lies for days in a hospital bed - but appears to make a full recovery. On discharge from hospital, Carl picks up the threads of his daily life, until he starts noticing strange leaps in his perception of time, distortions in his experience.

He is nearly seventy years old, but he looks as if he is only seven - for Max is ageing backwards. The tragedy of Max's life was to fall in love at seventeen with Alice, a girl his own age - but to her, Max looks like an unappealingly middle-aged man.

In his critically acclaimed book, In the Country of Country, Nicholas Dawidoff travels to the origins of country music and talks to the musicians who created this original American art form.

On a remote island in the middle of the Atlantic, secrets are buried. When the outside world comes calling, intent on manipulation for political and economic reasons, the islanders find their own world blown apart from the inside as well as beyond. By the author of "By Many Wounds".

Sex is often the closest they can get.' All the present controversies about the family are really discussions about monogamy. Monogamy is so much taken for granted as the foundation of the family and of family values that, as with anything that seems essential, we are very wary of being critical of it.

Thom Jones's magnificent first collection of stories presents a brutal vision of the human condition, in a world without mercy or redemption.

Has psychoanalysis failed to keep its promise? What are psychoanalysis and literature good for? And what, if anything, have they got to do with each other? Promises, Promises is a delightful new collection of essays which sets out to make and break the links between psychoanalysis and literature. It confirms Adam Phillips as a virtuoso performer able to reach far beyond the borders of psychoanalytic discourse into art, drama, poetry and history. This collection gives us insights into anorexia and cloning, the work of Tom Stoppard and A.E. Housman, the effect of the Blitz on Londoners, Nijinsky's diary and Martin Amis's Night Train, and provides a case history of clutter. In a final essay, the author turns to the question - why sign up for analysis when you could read a book?Promoting everywhere a refreshing version of a psychoanalysis that is more committed to happiness and inspiration than to self-knowledge or some absolute truth, Promises, Promises reaffirms Adam Phillips as a writer whose work, in the words of one reviewer, 'hovers in a strange and haunting borderland between rigour and delight.'

Does psychoanalysis teach us that freedom and equality are impossible for human beings? We would all like to think of ourselves as freedom-loving, egalitarian and democratic. Yet Freud has taught us that everything we do and say is rich in ambiguity and ambivalence: we are riven by conflict and antagonism, within and without. But if is true that our inner lives are one unflagging drama of desire and dependence, of greed, rivalry and abjection, then how can we ever presume to know what might be good for someone else? With all his customary grace and deftness, the celebrated writer Adam Phillips explores these issues in a liberating collection of essays. He looks at such topics as our fantasies of freedom and the nature of inhibition, at free association and the social role of mockery; he examine too the lives and works of such diverse figures as Svengali and Christopher Isherwood, Bertrand Russell and Saul Bellow. Throughout, Adam Phillips demonstrates how psychoanalysis - as a treatment and an experience and a way of reading - can, like democracy, allow people to speak and be heard.

Adam Phillips uses the idea of flirtation to explore the virtues of being uncommitted - to people, to ideas, to methods - and the pleasures of uncertainty. These buoyant essays promote a psychoanalysis with a light touch, a psychoanalysis for pleasure and curiosity.'In On Flirtation, he has again deployed all his erudition and perception to beguiling effect . . . Adam Phillips may well be one of our greatest contemporary psychoanalytic thinkers.' Independent on Sunday

Why are we all so spellbound by ideas of escape - and yet so dismissive of mere escapism? Houdini's Box explores four different escape artists. There is the case history of a little girl who is oddly committed to playing her own wayward version of hide and seek. There is Harry Houdini, the 'Greatest Magician the World has Ever Seen', who electrified the world through a series of death-defying escapes, compulsively re-inventing and re-enacting his own confinement. There is a man who, Jonah-like, is always arriving at the place he was escaping from, who thinks it is his destiny to be in flight, whether from women or from his analyst. And finally the poet Emily Dickinson, who for the last twenty years of her life finds freedom in self-imposed solitary confinement. In this, his most captivating book to date, Adam Phillips reminds us why people often feel most alive in the very moment of escape. But whether we are getting away from something, or getting away with something - as Icarus, or Oedipus, or Narcissus; as victims or tyrants - we cannot describe ourselves without also describing what we need to escape from, and what we want to escape to.

A Choice of Anglo-Saxon Verse contains the Old English texts of all the major short poems, such as 'The Battle of Maldon', 'The Dream of the Rood', 'The Wanderer' and 'The Seafarer', as well as a generous representation of the many important fragments, riddles and gnomic verses that survive from the seventh to the twelfth centuries, with facing-page verse translations. These poems are the well-spring of the English poetic tradition, and this anthology provides a unique window into the mind and culture of the Anglo-Saxons.The volume is an essential companion to Faber's edition of Beowulf, translated by Seamus Heaney.

LONGLISTED FOR THE BAILEY'S WOMEN'S PRIZE FOR FICTION 2017WINNER OF THE JAMES TAIT BLACK MEMORIAL PRIZE 2017SHORTLISTED FOR THE GOLDSMITHS PRIZE 2016SHORTLISTED FOR THE BORD GAIS IRISH NOVEL OF THE YEAR 2016SHORTLISTED FOR THE RSL ENCORE AWARD 2017SHORTLISTED FOR THE INTERNATIONAL DUBLIN LITERARY AWARD 2018LONGLISTED FOR THE BAILEY'S WOMEN'S PRIZE FOR FICTION 2017LONGLISTED FOR THE INTERNATIONAL DUBLIN LITERARY AWARD From the writer of one of the most memorable debuts of recent years, a story of first love and redemption. One night in London an eighteen year old girl, recently arrived from Ireland to study drama, meets an older actor and a tumultuous relationship ensues. Set across the bedsits and squats of mid-nineties north London, The Lesser Bohemians is a story about love and innocence, joy and discovery, the grip of the past and the struggle to be new again.

Selected Poems 1968-2014 offers forty-five years of work drawn from twelve 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. Among his many honours are the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry and the Shakespeare Prize 'for contributions from English-speaking Europe to the European inheritance.'

I can confirm that should you ever find yourself on stage playing the bass guitar with tree left hands, it is usually the one in the middle that is the real one. The other two are probably phantoms. Playing the Bass with Three Left Hands tells the story of one of the most influential, revered and ultimately demented British bands of the 1980s, Spacemen 3. In classic rock n roll style they split up on the brink of their major breakthrough. As the decade turned sour and acid house hit the news, Rugby's finest imploded spectacularly, with Jason Pierce (aka Jason Spaceman) and Pete Kember (aka Sonic Boom) going their separate ways. Here, Will Carruthers tells the whole sorry story and the segue into Spirtualised in one of the funniest and most memorable memoirs committed to the page.

The award-winning debut thriller from the bestselling author of Kolymsky Heights'Quite simply the best thriller writer around.' SpectatorNicolas Whistler is young, bored and in debt. When an opportunity to make some money arises, he can't turn it down. He is sent to Prague to carry out a simple assignment, but he soon finds himself trapped between the secret police and the clutches of the mysterious Vlasta. Whether he likes it or not, Nicolas is now a spy.'Fast-moving, exciting, often extraordinarily funny.' Sunday Times'Brilliant. Don't miss it.' Observer

Patron? Collaborator? Employer? Voyeur? Lover?Questioned about the nature of his relationship with the 3rd Earl of Southampton, William Shakespeare is on trial.The evidence: tender poems, financial dependency, attempted revolution.A compelling new drama set in Elizabethan England - a powder keg of sex, politics and power - Dedication by Nick Dear premiered at the Nuffield Theatre, Southampton, in September 2016.

Like so many children, Lucy wants a dog. But, unlike other children, Lucy interviews animals to fill the pet vacancy. And she gets a little more than she expected. Endearing and heart-warming, this story shows (with a humour that never overshadows the message) that being different is good.Another classic from this husband-and-wife team, told with simplicity and portrayed through appealing characters, illustrated with style and confidence.

Nobody likes Ben. Even Ben doesn't like Ben. He bullies everyone in his life, including his roommate Kalyan, an earnest Nepalese immigrant. When Ben discovers that his school crush is marrying a straight-laced banker, he sets out to destroy their relationship and win her back.Jesse Eisenberg's The Spoils was first produced by the New Group in New York. It was transferred by Lisa Matlin and Ambassador Theatre Group to Trafalgar Studios, London, where it received its UK premiere in May 2016.

As the acknowledged 'Queen of Crime' P.D. James was frequently commissioned by newspapers and magazines to write a special short story for Christmas. Four of the very best of these have been rescued from the archives and are published together for the first time. P.D. James's sparkling prose illuminates each of these perfectly formed stories, making them ideal reading for the darkest days of the year. While she delights in the secrets that lurk beneath the surface at enforced family gatherings, her Christmas stories also provide enjoyable puzzles to keep the reader guessing. From the title story about a strained country house gathering on Christmas Eve, another about an illicit affair that ends in murder, and two cases for James's poet-detective Adam Dalgliesh -- each treats the reader to James's masterfully atmospheric story-telling, always with the lure of a mystery to be solved.

Robert Schumann was far ahead of his time, not least in his attitude to children and young people; his 'Advice for Young Musicians', originally created to accompany his famous 'Album for the Young', remains as relevant today as when it was written.Celebrated cellist Steven Isserlis adds his own extensive commentary to Schumann's words of wisdom. The advice is by turns practical, humorous, and profound, making this volume a must for all aspiring musicians of all ages and standards.