Books published by Faber & Faber

From the Orange Prize winning author of HomeAcclaimed on publication as a contemporary classic, Housekeeping is the story of Ruth and Lucille, orphansgrowing up in the small desolate town of Fingerbone in the vast northwest of America.Abandoned by a succession of relatives, the sisters find themselves in the care of Sylvie, the remote and enigmatic sister of their dead mother. Steeped in imagery of the bleak wintry landscape around them, the sisters' struggle towards adulthood is powerfully portrayed in a novel about loss, loneliness and transience.'I love and have lived with this book . . . it holds a unique and quiet place among the masterpieces of 20th century American fiction.' Paul Bailey'I found myself reading slowly, than more slowly--this is not a novel to be hurried through, for every sentence is a delight.' Doris Lessing

Ram Karan, a corrupt official in the Delhi school system, lives in one of the city's slums with his widowed daughter and his eight-year-old granddaughter. Bumbling, ironical, sad, Ram is also a man tortured by a terrible guilty secret. When Rajiv Gandhi, the soon-to-be Prime Minister, is murdered, the country is plunged into confusion and Ram, as his department's resident bribe-collector, is trapped in a series of escalating, potentially deadly political betrayals. While he tries to protect himself and his family, his daughter reveals a crime that he had hoped would be buried forever. An Obedient Father takes the reader to an India that is both far away and real - into the mind of a character as tormented, funny, and morally ambiguous as one of Dostoevsky's anti-heroes. This is a subtly rendered tragicomedy of contemporary India by an enormously gifted young writer.

Ajay, eight years old, spends his afternoons playing cricket in the streets of Delhi with his brother Birju, four years older. They are about to leave for shiny new life in America. Ajay anticipates, breathlessly, a world of jet-packs and chewing-gum. This promised land of impossible riches and dazzling new technology is also a land that views Ajay with suspicion and hostility; one where he must rely on his big brother to tackle classroom bullies. Birju, confident, popular, is the repository of the family's hopes, and he spends every waking minute studying for the exams that will mean entry to the Bronx High School of Science, and reflected glory for them all.When a terrible accident makes a mockery of that dream, the family splinters. The boys' mother restlessly seeks the help of pundits from the temple, while their father retreats into silent despair - and the bottle. Now Ajay must find the strength of character to navigate this brave new American world, and the sorrows at home, on his own terms.By turns blackly funny, touching, raw and devastating, Family Life is a vivid and wrenching portrait of sibling relationships and the impact of tragedy on one family from a boy's eye view.

Come home, if you can...For fans of LEE CHILD's Jack Reacher and DENNIS LEHANE's Kenzie and Gennaro, an unputdownable series debut, from a thrilling new voice in American crime writing'A zipline ride of a thriller, plummeting through the back alleys of Seattle ... Hamilton has crafted a compelling new hero in Van Shaw.' Gregg Hurwitz, New York Times bestsellerIf my grandfather's letter had stopped at the comma, I would have tossed it in the trash... only the last three words mattered. If you can. That passed for please, in the old man's way of talking... If you canscared me a little.Meet Van Shaw - soldier, ex-con - as he returns to his native Seattle after a decade's self-imposed exile. Answering voices from his past, he finds a whole heap of trouble, and himself the prime suspect in the brutal attack on his grandfather. Drawn back into the violent, high-stakes life he tried to leave behind, he has to try and see right from wrong amid the secrets and resentments of those he was once closest to.Think Boston crime think Dennis Lehane, think Washington DC think George Pelecanos, think LAthink Michael Connelly - and now, think Seattle think Glen Erik Hamilton

Stephen Ward charts the rise and fall from grace of the man at the centre of the Profumo Scandal. Friend to film stars, spies, models, government ministers and aristocrats, his rise and ultimate disgrace coincided with the increasingly permissive lifestyle of London's elite in the early 1960s. Andrew Lloyd Webber's musical, with book and lyrics by Christopher Hampton and Don Black, centres on Ward's involvement with the young and beautiful Christine Keeler, which led to one of the biggest political scandals and most famous trials of the twentieth century. Stephen Ward premiered at the Aldwych Theatre, London, in December 2013.

For the second half of his long life, Christopher Logue (1926-2011) - political rebel, inventor of the poster poem, pioneer of poetry and jazz - was at work on a very different project: a rewriting of Homer's Iliad. The volumes that appeared from War Music (1981) onwards were distinct from translations, in that they set out to be a radical reimagining and reconfiguration of Homer's tale of warfare, human folly and the power of the gods, in a language and style of verse that were emphatically modern. As each instalment, from Kings to Cold Calls, was published, it became clear that this was to be Logue's masterpiece.Sadly, illness prevented him from finishing it. Enough, however, of his projected final volume, Big Men Falling a Long Way, survives in notebook drafts to give a clear sense of its shape, as well as some of its dramatic high points. These have been gathered into an appendix by Logue's friend and one-time editor, Christopher Reid. The result comes as near as possible to representing the poet's complete vision, and confirms what his admirers have long known, that Logue's Homer is one of the great poems of our time.

The political thriller of the year - UPDATED WITH A DEVASTATING NEW CHAPTER ON THE CHILCOT INQUIRY'Excellent' Sunday Times'Devastating' Daily MailWhen Tony Blair became prime minister in 1997, he was, at forty-three, the youngest to hold that office since 1812. With a landslide majority, his approval rating was 93 per cent and he went on to become Labour's longest-serving premier. So what went wrong? With unprecedented access to more than 180 Whitehall officials, military officers and politicians, Tom Bower has uncovered the full story of Blair's decade in power. He has followed Blair's trail from his resignation, since which he has built a remarkable empire advising tycoons and tyrants. The result is the political thriller of the year, illuminating the mystery of an extraordinary politician who continues to fascinate to this day.

Tornado Pratt is the last of the old-style American tycoons, one who has lived his life with ferocious vigour through the vacillating fortunes of the twentieth-century USA. Paul Ableman's novel finds him in a hotel room at the end of his days, as he recounts via a dying monologue the events of his turbulent life. What is revealed, in a testimony full of jokes and surprises, is a brash, lustful, comic, profane, naive and sentimental man who, driven on by remorse, displays a wry and perceptive honesty about himself, even as his memories begin to merge with imaginings. Often funny and sometimes moving, Tornado Pratt's voice is an unforgettable one in which he confronts his own mortality, and in which Paul Ableman gives us an astonishing, affecting and life-affirming story. Auberon Waugh called Tornado Pratt 'a magnificent and memorable novel'.

The hero of Paul Ableman's Vilp (1962) is Clive Witt, a novelist in search of a hero for his new novel. He advertises for suitable applicants, and from seventy-three replies he selects three: Professor Guthrie Pidge, a zoologist; Pad Dee Murphy, an Irish-Burmese peasant; and Harry Glebe, the inventor of the renowned earth-borer.Clive's novel, though, progresses slowly. His three heroes refuse to mix their very disparate elements into a harmonious whole. Eventually, Clive scraps it and harnesses his team of heroes to a new work, an exciting science fiction tale called The Silver Spores. In this, mankind meets the Vilp! The novel ends with the 5,000 strong Vilp Galactic Council communing in space at an incredibly high telepathic level.'Excellent... vital, taut, brilliantly imaginative' Anthony Burgess

'This book seems to be about us. Within a day or two of starting it I devised a title: VAC... The subtle idea was to fuse the suggestion of holiday or vacation with that of vacuum...'Paul Ableman's third novel, first published in 1968, is - through the voice of its narrator Billy Soodernim, libidinous and regretful by turns - a meditation on love and carnality, monogamy and promiscuity, childbirth, separation and indeed the whole of the fraught relations between the sexes: 'male and female, citizens with distinct personalities, flesh inwraught in flesh.' 'Paul Ableman's novels were praised for their inventive language, bawdy high spirits, and originality of form by Anthony Burgess, Philip Toynbee, Robert Nye and other friends of the avant-garde. They are witty, original, and full of good humour, and I am delighted Faber Finds are reissuing them.' Margaret Drabble

First published in 1962 As Near as I Can Get was Paul Ableman's follow up to his critically acclaimed debut I Hear Voices. Following Alan Peebles, a young man struggling to become a poet, As Near as I Can depicts a mid-twentieth century London of offices, pubs and lodgings. Fuelled by drink through these desperate years, the narrator charts his encounters with women and fellow artists, as he seeks to glimpse a wonder in life barely discernible beneath the routine of every day. 'Paul Ableman's novels were praised for their inventive language, bawdy high spirits, and originality of form by Anthony Burgess, Philip Toynbee, Robert Nye and other friends of the avant-garde. They are witty, original, and full of good humour, and I am delighted Faber Finds are reissuing them.' Margaret Drabble

Paul Ableman's modern masterpiece was first published by the Olympia Press of Paris in 1958, to instant acclaim. The narrator of I Hear Voices is a young schizophrenic who transports himself, and the reader, through a wondrously transfigured city where the real and the fantastic blend together in a seamless enchantment. The continual stream and buzz of events is often comical, occasionally wrenching, and always unpredictable. Encounters with Miss Carpet, The Commissioner, Merkitt and Mrs Oil, among others, are filled with poignant satire and disquieting honesty in this vision of the fragmentation of contemporary life. This Faber Finds edition of I Hear Voices includes a preface by Margaret Drabble: her obituary for Paul Ableman, who died in 2006.'The book, not excluding Lolita, which gave me the greatest pride and pleasure to publish.' Maurice Girodias'A strikingly fresh and original work of art... The writing is brilliant; both terrifying and hilariously funny.' Philip Toynbee, Observer'Subtle, humorous, clinically authentic.' Times Literary Supplement

With an exhaustive knowledge of popular culture and an effortless ability to spin brilliant prose out of unlikely subject matter, Klosterman attacks the entire spectrum of postmodern America: reality TV, Internet porn, breakfast cereal, serial killers, Pamela Anderson, literary Jesus freaks, and the real difference between apples and oranges (of which there is none). Sex, Drugs and Coca Puffs is ostensibly about movies, sport, television, music, books, video games and kittens, but really it's about us. All of us.

In a high-end hotel room, rising football stars Jason and Ade are living the dream. Goals, girls and glory. Tomorrow they make their first-team debut. But the game starts before you've even walked out the tunnel.Twelve years. Three hotel rooms. One last gamble.An agile new story about sex, fame and how much you're willing to lose in order to win, The Pass premiered at the Royal Court Theatre, London, in January 2014.

The perfect gift for children aged 8+, this stunning classic collection of poetry will delight a new generation of readers of the Faber Children's Classics list.Peacock Pie contains the finest of Walter de la Mare's poems for children, accompanied by exquisite original illustrations from Edward Ardizzone. This beautiful new edition of a classic anthology is an essential part of any child's bookshelf.

'He gives us more than himself or 'a world'; he gives us a sense of infinity embodied in the language.' Alongside Joseph Brodsky's words of praise one might mention the more concrete honours that the renowned poet Derek Walcott has received: a MacArthur Fellowship; the Queen's Gold Medal for Poetry; the Nobel Prize in Literature. The Poetry of Derek Walcott 1948-2013 draws from every stage of the poet's storied career. Here are examples of his very earliest work, like 'In My Eighteenth Year,' published when the poet himself was still a teenager; his first widely celebrated verse, like 'A Far Cry from Africa,' which speaks of violence, of loyalties divided in one's very blood; his mature work, like 'The Schooner Flight' from The Star-Apple Kingdom; and his late masterpieces, like the tender 'Sixty Years After,' from the 2010 collection White Egrets. Across sixty-five years, Walcott has grappled with the themes that have defined his work as they have defined his life: the unsolvable riddle of identity; the painful legacy of colonialism on his native Caribbean island of St. Lucia; the mysteries of faith and love and the natural world; the Western canon, celebrated and problematic; the trauma of growing old, of losing friends, family, one's own memory. This collection, selected by Walcott's friend the English poet Glyn Maxwell, will prove as enduring as the questions, the passions, that have driven Walcott to write for more than half a century.

A long-haired woman moves into the priest's house and sets fire to his furniture. That Christmas, the electricity goes out. A forester mortgages his land and goes off to a seaside town looking for a wife. He finds a woman eating alone in the hotel. A farmer wakes half-naked and realises the money is almost gone. And in the title story, a priest waits on the altar for a bride and battles, all that wedding day, with his memories of a love affair. In her long-awaited second collection, Claire Keegan observes an Ireland wrestling with its past.

'Beautifully crafted, and so finely balanced that she holds the reader right up against the tender humanity of her characters.' Eimear McBride'A writer of rare elegance and beauty, Caldwell doesn't just get inside her characters' minds. She perches in the precarious chambers of their hearts, telling their stories truthfully and tenderly.' IndependentMultitudes is the beautiful debut story collection from the acclaimed, prize-winning novelist and playwright Lucy CaldwellFrom Belfast to London and back again the ten stories that comprise Caldwell's first collection explore the many facets of growing up - the pain and the heartache, the tenderness and the joy, the fleeting and the formative - or 'the drunkenness of things being various'. Stories of longing and belonging, they culminate with the heart-wrenching and unforgettable title story.

Ten years out of Yale, with an extra degree from Oxford, and all Greg Marnier has to show for it is a rambling academic career that has landed him in Aberystwyth. At his college reunion, jetlagged and drunk, he runs into an old friend who offers him an extraordinary way out.Robert James, wealthy and influential, a success story of the dotcom bubble, wants to become a political player. His plan: to buy up several abandoned neighbourhoods in Detroit - the poster child for urban decline - and build a new America from their boarded-up ruins. For a small investment, Marnier can transform himself into a twenty-first-century pioneer. The realities of life on America's urban frontier soon become apparent. For every hopeful misfit who's come for a fresh start there's a native Detroiter whose patch is being swallowed up by the new colonials. Marnier finds himself caught in the middle of everyone else's battles - between local and outsider, rich and poor, black and white - until a terrible accident forces him to take sides.

England, 1255: Sarah is only seventeen when she chooses to become an anchoress, a holy woman shut away in a small cell, measuring seven paces by nine, at the side of the village church. Fleeing the grief of losing a much-loved sister in childbirth and the pressure to marry, she decides to renounce the world, with all its dangers, desires and temptations, and to commit herself to a life of prayer and service to God. But as she slowly begins to understand, even the thick, unforgiving walls of her cell cannot keep the outside world away, and it is soon clear that Sarah's body and soul are still in great danger...Robyn Cadwallader's powerful debut novel tells an absorbing story of faith, desire, shame, fear and the very human need for connection and touch. With a poetic intelligence, Cadwallader explores the relationship between the mind, body and spirit in Medieval England in a story that will hold the reader in a spell until the very last page.

A powerful and haunting classic about a girl haunted by her own dreams.Ill and bored with having to stay in bed, Marianne picks up a pencil and starts doodling - a house, a garden, a boy at the window. That night she has an extraordinary dream. She is transported into her own picture, and as she explores further she soon realises she is not alone. The boy at the window is called Mark, and his every movement is guarded by the menacing stone watchers that surround the solitary house. Together, in their dreams, Marianne and Mark must save themselves...The perfect gift for girls aged 8+, this well-loved classic will delight a new generation of readers of the Faber Children's Classics list.

She is the missing girl. But she doesn't know she's lost.Carmel Wakeford becomes separated from her mother at a local children's festival, and is found by a man who claims to be her estranged grandfather. He tells her that her mother has had an accident and that she is to live with him for now. As days become weeks with her new family, 8-year-old Carmel realises that this man believes she has a special gift...While her mother desperately tries to find her, Carmel embarks on an extraordinary journey, one that will make her question who she is - and who she might become.

John McGahern did not spread himself thinly as a writer. Nearly all of his creative energy went into what was central for him: the great novels and stories that are now part of the canon of Irish and world literature. Yet he spoke out when he felt he had something worth saying and his non-fiction writings are of great interest to anyone who loves his work, and to all those interested in the recent history of Ireland. This book brings together all of McGahern's surviving essays, reviews and speeches. In them his canon of great writers - Tolstoy, Chekhov, James, Proust and Joyce - is cited many times, with deep and subtle appreciation. His discussions of Irish writers who influenced him are generous and brilliant - among them Michael McLaverty, Ernie O'Malley and Forrest Reid. His interventions on issues he felt strongly about - sectarianism, women's rights, the power of the church in Ireland - are lucid and far-sighted.

The stories in High Ground are set in ordinary places, in the streets and suburbs and dancehalls of Dublin, the small towns and fields of the midlands, the big houses of the beleaguered Anglo-Irish in the aftermath of their ascendancy, the whole changing country propelled in a generation from the nineteenth into the late twentieth century.

This remarkable volume brings together all of John McGahern's short fiction, fully revised, in a definitive text. McGahern has long been recognized as a contemporary master of the short story; The Collected Stories confirms his reputation as Ireland's leading prose writer.

This third edition of Alan Brownjohn's Collected Poems was first published by the Enitharmon Press in 2006. It adds over 140 poems to the second, which appeared in 1988. This volume comprises all of the work that Brownjohn wishes to retain from his twelve individual collections published between 1954 and 2004; it also incorporates a number of newer uncollected poems.Wide-ranging in theme and displaying an impressive mastery of form, this body of writing firmly establishes Alan Brownjohn's achievement as central to the English poetry of the last half-century.'Wonderfully rich and well-produced... Brownjohn is a marvellously skilful comedian... he is a social poet in the sense that if people in the future want to know what many lives were like in the second half of the 20th century, they should read Alan Brownjohn - observant, troubled, humane, scrupulous, wry, funny.' Anthony Thwaite, Guardian

Young Chekhov contains a trilogy of plays by the Russian writer Anton Chekhov, written as he emerged as the greatest playwright of the late nineteenth century. The three works, Platanov, Ivanov and The Seagull, in contemporary adaptations by David Hare, will be staged at the Chichester Festival Theatre in the summer of 2015.

'Britain's equivalent to Patricia Highsmith, Celia Fremlin wrote psychological thrillers that changed the landscape of crime fiction for ever: her novels are domestic, subtle, penetrating - and quite horribly chilling.' Andrew TaylorWith No Crying (1980), Celia Fremlin's eleventh novel, tells of Miranda, a daydreaming fifteen-year-old schoolgirl who has encouraged a boy to seduce her and is glad to find herself pregnant, but then bitterly resentful when her parents talk her into an abortion. She pads up her stomach, runs away from home, and finds refuge in a squat where her new housemates await the newborn keenly. How, though, can Miranda save face? 'An acute piece of social observation, psychological insight, and intuitive sympathy that makes for a very satisfying read... Quite brilliant, nicely understated, and tantalisingly real.' Hampstead & Highgate Express

The Trouble-Makers (1963) was Celia Fremlin's fourth novel and - as Chris Simmons contends in his new preface to this Faber Finds edition - has a case to be considered among her very best.Katharine is a suburban housewife, desultorily unemployed, unhappily married, struggling to keep up appearances but consoled to some degree by the even more aggravated woes of her next-door neighbour Mary - until, that is, Katharine is brought to the disturbing realisation that Mary's predicament is in fact substantially worse. 'A cleverly devised story. A chorus of nicely-characterised suburban wives speculate on Mary's troubles. Fremlin builds up the whole thing into a crescendo of horror.' Sunday Times'One again Fremlin shows how incomparably more chilling is her quiet, semifactual style than some of the hysterical sentimentalities from Over the Water.' Guardian

'Britain's equivalent to Patricia Highsmith, Celia Fremlin wrote psychological thrillers that changed the landscape of crime fiction for ever: her novels are domestic, subtle, penetrating - and quite horribly chilling.' Andrew TaylorThe Spider-Orchid (1977), Celia Fremlin's tenth novel, is among her most unnerving. Peggy has divorced Adrian but she accepts his deep attachment to their fourteen-year-old daughter, Amelia, and hers to him. Rita is Adrian's mistress, and he believes he is in love with her - until her husband Derek agrees to a divorce. Then Adrian is appalled when Rita moves in, destroying his privacy and endangering his relationship with Amelia.'Vintage Fremlin, this is one of the best crime novels of the year... With consummate, subtle skill, the author builds up suspense.' Financial Times'To the very last paragraph we are kept tenterhooked.' Times