Books published by Faber & Faber

'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

Seven Lean Years (1961) was Celia Fremlin's third novel of suspense. Its protagonist is Ellen Fortescue, engaged to be married, but oddly uneasy about her approaching wedding. Her fiance Leonard is a man of varying moods, most combustibly where the subject of his stepmother Laura is concerned. Ellen is inclined to a kinder view; but then the woman Ellen calls 'Cousin Laura' does have a complicated history with the Fortescue family...'Fremlin wraps up her little mystery cunningly in this accomplished thriller-chiller of a book.' Sunday Times'Fremlin has a quite extraordinary ability for imbuing the normal with intimations of doom-to-come. And when she begins to develop her elegantly horrible climax, the shivers chase each other down one's spine.'Birmingham Post'Celia Fremlin is about our best hope to compete with the American intelligent superior suspense school.'Observer

'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 TaylorPossession was Celia Fremlin's seventh novel, first published in 1969. Middle-class mother Clare Erskine initially thinks it a great stroke of luck when her 19 year-old daughter Sarah becomes engaged to a young man with a steady job. However Clare's betrothed, Mervyn Redmayne, has a notable black mark against him: a widowed mother with a petulant, inescapable grip on her son.Brilliant... yet another of Miss Fremlin's triumphs.' Times'Fremlin, masterly delineator of suburban sin and distiller of eerie tensions from commonplace events, achieves a formidable triumph in this new thriller... a must for addicts of the genre.' Scotsman

Celia Fremlin's sixth novel Prisoner's Base (1967) served further proof of her mastery at uncovering anxieties and even terrors in the domestic sphere. It tells of grandmother Margaret, her daughter Claudia, and Claudia's daughter Helen, who share a home from which Claudia's husband is frequently absent. Claudia has a penchant for taking strangers under her wing and into the house, the danger being that they never leave. But a different danger is proposed by Maurice, a self-styled poet who boasts that he has served seven years in prison for manslaughter.'Haunting...Fremlin continues to prove that the modern horror story makes the traditional Gothic one no more than a child's make-believe.' Los Angeles Times'Gripping... a tense thriller that keeps one in suspense until the very last line.' Manchester Evening News

'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 TaylorCelia Fremlin's third collection of stories, first published in 1984, is a baker's dozen of gripping tales by the mistress of suspense. Within these covers are stories of family frustrations and fury - a young wife who wants rid of her husband, an elderly daughter who cannot endure her mother. Fremlin deals in the uncanny, too, constantly confounding our expectations, and those of her characters.'Wonderfully written, subtle and disturbing.' Times'Written with such perception and elegance that they repay many readings.' Glasgow Herald'Celia Fremlin is an astonishing writer, who explores that nightmare country where brain, mind and self battle to establish the truth. She illuminates her dark world with acute perception and great wit.' Natasha Cooper

'A truly funny, sharp comedy that is packaged inside a psychological thriller.' Spectator'A delightful and masterly achievement.' Financial TimesCelia Fremlin's twelfth novel, originally published in 1982, tells the tale of Martin Lockwood, a man stuck between a wife and a mistress and frustrated by his faltering doctoral thesis on depression. Then he encounters Ruth Ledbetter, a smart, unbalanced, potentially dangerous young woman who soon insinuates herself into Martin's life, his home - and his PhD.'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 Taylor'Celia Fremlin is an astonishing writer, who explores that nightmare country where brain, mind and self battle to establish the truth. She illuminates her dark world with acute perception and great wit.' Natasha Cooper

'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 Long Shadow (1975), Celia Fremlin's ninth novel, tells a Christmas story with a difference. Imogen Barnicott's husband - a celebrated, cruel and egocentric professor of Classics - has recently died in a car accident. Now, to the pain of widowhood is added the attentions of an anonymous phone-caller who accuses Imogen of murder and alleges that he can prove it. But can Imogen be certain her husband is truly dead and gone?'Genuine chiller... Splendid suspense in a brilliantly captured domestic setting.' Sunday Telegraph'The story unfolds with brilliant ingenuity, always on the verge of explanation, ever plausibly plunging deeper.' Times

'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 TaylorListening in the Dusk (1990), Celia Fremlin's thirteenth novel, concerns Alice Saunders, a woman striking out on her own following a traumatic marital breakup. But when she rents a drafty attic room in a ramshackle London boarding house she meets the mysterious Mary - a young woman clearly terrified of something, or someone.'Tart and chilling piece of superior Fremlin Gothic, with some wonderful characterization and great comic passages.' Sunday Times'Suspense and mystery at its elegant best.' Birmingham Post'Celia Fremlin is an astonishing writer, who explores that nightmare country where brain, mind and self battle to establish the truth. She illuminates her dark world with acute perception and great wit.' Natasha Cooper

'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 TaylorKing of the World (1994), Celia Fremlin's sixteenth and final novel, is the story of flat-mates Bridget and Diane. Despite ten years in age between them they get on well - aside from the constant presence of Alistair, Diane's self-impressed boyfriend, in the flat. The women decide to look for a third tenant, and find Norah, who claims to be a battered wife seeking refuge. But Norah is telling lies that will put all of them in mortal danger.'Celia Fremlin is an astonishing writer, who explores that nightmare country where brain, mind and self battle to establish the truth. She illuminates her dark world with acute perception and great wit.' Natasha Cooper

'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 Echoing Stones (1993) was Celia Fremlin's fifteenth novel. Arnold Walker's decision to take early retirement and become caretaker and tourist guide at a Tudor mansion changes his life dramatically. His wife Mildred leaves him, and his wayward daughter Flora arrives unexpectedly and agrees to help out. Together, they must reckon with Emmerton Hall's former curator, Sir Humphrey Penrose, a sufferer from senile dementia given to spontaneous acting out of bizarre historical events, whose antics will lead to sheer bloody murder. 'Celia Fremlin is an astonishing writer, who explores that nightmare country where brain, mind and self battle to establish the truth. She illuminates her dark world with acute perception and great wit.' Natasha Cooper

The Hours Before Dawn (1958) was Celia Fremlin's debut fiction, and won the Edgar Award for novel of the year from the Mystery Writers of America. Over time Fremlin would earn the soubriquet of 'the mistress of psychological suspense.'Louise Henderson is a young housewife and mother, trying her best to tend to a husband, two small daughters and a constantly crying baby. Her fatigue is such that she fears she is nearing psychosis; and she can't help but feel that a new lodger in the house, a seemingly respectable schoolmistress, poses a threat to her and her family.'Tightly plotted and admirably concise... Fremlin expertly ratchets up the tension, notch by notch.' Laura Wilson'Highly intelligent entertainment, beautifully written with wit and humour.' Frances Fyfield'It grips like grim death.' Spectator

Don't Go to Sleep in the Dark (1972) was the first gathering of Celia Fremlin's short fiction, a form in which she had published prolifically - for the likes of She, Playmen, and Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine - while building her reputation as a novelist of psychological suspense.Female characters predominate in these tales, as does the doom-filled atmosphere that was Fremlin's metier. She explores her familiar theme of strained mother-child relations, but she also delves into the supernatural realm as well as the psychological. As ever, her capacities for making the everyday unnerving and keeping the reader guessing are richly in evidence.'Here are thirteen harrowing tales by the indisputable mistress of horror.' Chattanooga Times'An outstanding collection...all are well-written and all are possible and none should be read when alone in a dark house.' Savannah Morning News

'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 TaylorClare Wakefield - protagonist of Celia Fremlin's 1991 novel, her fourteenth - is more dismayed than elated when she learns of her journalist husband's escape from Middle Eastern kidnappers. Edwin is a difficult man, and home life had been so much more relaxed without him. But dismay turns to fear once Clare begins to suspect that Edwin has practiced an extraordinary deception - and for the purpose of murder. 'A thoughtful, entertaining thriller.' Booklist'I cannot recommend [it] too highly.' Time Out'Celia Fremlin is an astonishing writer, who explores that nightmare country where brain, mind and self battle to establish the truth. She illuminates her dark world with acute perception and great wit.' Natasha Cooper

By Horror Haunted (1974) was Celia Fremlin's second collection of stories, and it runs the gamut of her many talents. The nightmarish plots, wit, elegance, and domestic details with an undertow of unease have lost none of their edge. 'Her Number On It' is a compelling portrait of kleptomania; the 'Unsuspected Talent' of a dissatisfied wife has dangerous consequences; while 'Don't Tell Cissie' is a superbly original ghost story. 'The reader is lulled in to a false knowledge of events... At the last moment the events are turned inside out and the actions are re-interpreted nastily, chillingly or with penetrating realism.' Catholic Herald 'A really delightful collection of short stories...the suspense, in some of them, is almost painful... [Fremlin] is the complete mistress of an extremely difficult art form.' Huddersfield Day Examiner

We know the thrilling, terrible stories of the battles of the Napoleonic wars - but what of those left behind? The people on a Norfolk farm, in a Yorkshire mill, a Welsh iron foundry, an Irish village, a London bank or a Scottish mountain? The aristocrats and paupers, old and young, butchers and bakers and candlestick makers - how did the war touch their lives? Every part of Britain felt the long twenty years of war against the French: one in five families had people in the services and over 300,000 men died. As the years passed, so the bullish, flamboyant figure of Napoleon - Boney, the bogeyman - came to dominate so much that the whole long conflict was given his name. Jenny Uglow, the prize-winning author of The Lunar Men and Nature's Engraver, follows the gripping back-and-forth of the first global war, but turns the news upside down, seeing how it reached the people. Illustrated by the satires of Gillray, Rowlandson and the paintings of Turner and Constable, and combining the familiar voices of Jane Austen, Wordsworth, Scott and Byron with others lost in the crowd, In These Times delves into the archives to tell the moving story of how people lived and loved and sang and wrote, struggling through hard times and opening new horizons that would change their country for a century ahead.

Sunday Times Classical Music Book of the Year'Magisterial, warm, and engaging . . . A triumph of scholarship and musical affinity . . . Jan Swafford is to be saluted.' IndependentJan Swafford's biographies of composers Charles Ives and Johannes Brahms have established him as a revered music historian, capable of bringing his subjects vibrantly to life. His magnificent new biography of Ludwig van Beethoven peels away layers of legend to get to the living, breathing human being who composed some of the world's most iconic music. Swafford mines sources never before used in English-language biographies to reanimate the revolutionary ferment of Enlightenment-era Bonn, where Beethoven grew up and imbibed the ideas that would shape all of his future work. Swafford then tracks his subject to Vienna, capital of European music, where Beethoven built his career in the face of critical incomprehension, crippling ill health, romantic rejection, and 'fate's hammer', his ever-encroaching deafness. At the time of his death he was so widely celebrated that over ten thousand people attended his funeral.This book is a biography of Beethoven the man and musician, not the myth, and throughout, Swafford - himself a composer - offers insightful readings of Beethoven's key works. More than a decade in the making, this will be the standard Beethoven biography for years to come.

Popular uprisings in Poland and Hungary shake Moscow's hold on its eastern European empire. Across the American South, and in the Union of South Africa, black people risk their livelihoods, and their lives, in the struggle to dismantle institutionalised white supremacy and secure first-class citizenship. France and Britain, already battling anti-colonial insurgencies in Algeria and Cyprus, now face the humiliation of Suez. Meanwhile, in Cuba, Fidel Castro and his band of rebels take to the Sierra Maestra to plot the overthrow of a dictator... 1956 was one of the most remarkable years of the twentieth century. All across the globe, ordinary people spoke out, filled the streets and city squares, and took up arms in an attempt to win their freedom. In response to these unprecedented challenges to their authority, those in power fought back, in a desperate bid to shore up their position. It was an epic contest, and one which made 1956 - like 1789 and 1848 - a year that changed our world.

In the midst of the fighting, two Russian soldiers seek refuge in the crypt of a German church. There, clutched in the hands of a skeleton priest, they find The Shepherd; a priceless icon thought to have been destroyed long ago. When news of its discovery reaches Moscow, Stalin calls upon his most trusted investigator, Inspector Pekkala, once a favorite of Tsar and known to all of Russia as The Emerald Eye. To unravel the secret of the icon's past, Pekkala traces its last known whereabouts to a band of self-mutilating radicals known as The Skoptsy, who were hunted to extinction years by the Bolshevik Secret Police. Or so it was believed. As Pekkala soon learns, the last survivors of this brutal sect have clung to life in the shadowy forests of Siberia. With the reappearance of the icon, they have returned to claim the treasure they say belongs to them alone, bringing with them a new and terrible weapon to unleash upon the Russian people. Unless the Emerald Eye can stop them.

,amon de Valera is the most remarkable man in the history of modern Ireland. Much as Churchill personified British resistance to Hitler and de Gaulle personified the freedom of France, de Valera personified Irish independence. From his emergence in the aftermath of the 1916 rebellion as the republican leader, he bestrode Irish politics like a colossus for over fifty years. On the eve of the centenary of the Irish revolution, one of Ireland's most eminent historians explains why Eamon de Valera was such a divisive figure that he has never until now received the recognition he deserves. This biography reconciles an acknowledgement of de Valera's catastrophic failure in 1921-22, when his petulant rejection of the Anglo-Irish Treaty shaped the dimensions of a bloody civil war, with an appreciation of his subsequent greatness as the statesman who single-handedly severed the ties with Britain and defined nationalist Ireland's sense of itself.

You'll laugh until you die! Adam Meltzer, the world's most neurotic teenager, who just happens to be a zombie, is back! After solving the mystery of the zombees, Adam and his friends Corina (a vegan vampire) and Ernesto (a reluctant chupacubra) head off to summer camp for a well-earned break from detective work. But the countryside in their hometown of Croxton is just as weird and wonderful and soon they are investigating something deadly dangerous in the deep, dark woods...

'The cat himself knows and will never confess...'To celebrate Old Possum's 75th anniversary we have commissioned lively new illustrations from Rebecca Ashdown for T.S. Eliot's original book of Practical Cats. Featuring Macavity, the Mystery Cat; Mr Mistofelees, the Original Conjuring Cat; Mungojerrie and Rumpelteazer and all the gang, this is a must for every child's bookshelf and is a great companion to the Andrew Lloyd Webber stage show.

'Echo's Bones' was intended by Samuel Beckett to form the 'recessional' or end-piece of his early collection of interrelated stories, More Pricks Than Kicks, published in 1934. The story was written at the request of the publisher, but was held back from inclusion in the published volume. 'Echo's Bones' has remained unpublished to this day, and the present edition will situate the work in terms of its biographical context, its Joycean influences, and as a vital link in the evolution of Beckett's early work.The editor, Mark Nixon, is director of the Beckett International Foundation at the University of Reading.

In The Missionary's Wife (1996) - his return to historical fiction - Tim Jeal expertly evoked Africa in the 1890s: a continent in turmoil as a horde of prospecters, hunters and missionaries scramble after gold, ivory, and converts. Young Englishwoman Clara Musson, though, travels with a different purpose. Jilted in love, doubting her Christian faith, she hoped to find renewed meaning as the wife of charismatic missionary Robert Haslam. What she finds is an obsessive zeal that will provoke a civil war.'A powerful love story fleshed out with vivid historical detail, narrative tension and subtle post-colonial awareness... remarkably engaging and skilfully told.' Guardian'Jeal brilliantly evokes the sights and sounds and smells of 1890s Africa.' Sunday Times'Brilliantly plotted... a book of deep moral intelligence.' Lynn Barber, Literary Review'Gripping... moving and convincing.' Allan Massie, Scotsman

Timothy Hart is getting used to the good life with his new imagination box. Anything he can imagine, he can create! There's only one rule - the box mustn't leave Tim's room.But Tim has never been good at following rules - especially when there's the opportunity to 'imagine' his homework into being without actually having to do it. Tim is feeling rather pleased with himself...Until he notices the strange people following him, and then chasing him, and then his beloved imagination box being ripped from his hands.He'll need the help of a top secret scientific institution if he's going to save the imagination box from corruption of the worst possible kind.Sequel to the critically acclaimed debut, The Imagination Box.

This is the story of Adebisi, a brave African huntress who sets out for the Jungle of the Pigmies to rescue her four brothers. Along the way, she conquers a giant, serves as the barber to a king and endures the horrors of the pigmies' prison. Yet she will not give up. By employing her strength and intelligence, she finds a way to release her brothers and returns home to a hero's welcome.

In Feather Woman of the Jungle, the people of a Yoruba village gather on ten memorable nights to hear the stories and wisdom of their chief. They learn of his adventures, among them his encounter with the Jungle Witch and her ostrich, his visit to the town of the water people and his imprisonment by the Goddess of Diamonds. Each night the people return, eager to discover if there is a happy ending.Amos Tutuola was born in Abeokuta, Nigeria, in 1920. His first novel, The Palm-Wine Drinkard, was acquired by T. S. Eliot and published by Faber in 1952.

Yoruba legend and culture were the source of much of Amos Tutuola's writing and the stories collected here are no exception. They feature characters from folklore, archetypal figures from Yoruba society, supernatural or magical happenings, acute human observation and often a moral point. Their very titles - from 'The Duckling Brothers and their Disobedient Sister' to 'Don't Pay Bad for Bad' - are evocative of a unique blend of tradition and imagination, which belongs to the same universal culture as Aesop and the Brothers Grimm.

High up in the Conrad Flats that loom bleakly over Acton, two future stars of the literary scene - or so they assume - are hard at work, tapping out words of wit and brilliance between ill-paid jobs writing captions for the Cat Calendar 1985 and blurbs for trashy novels with titles like Brothel of the Vampire. Just twenty-one but already well entrenched in a life eked out on dole payments, pints and dollops of porridge and pasta, Llewellyn and Cunningham don't have it too bad: a pub on the corner, a misdirected parental allowance, and the delightful company of Aoife, Llewellyn's model fiancee, mother of his young baby - and the woman of Cunningham's increasingly vivid dreams.Alan Warner's superb new novel sees the author of Morvern Callar at the top of his game.

In 1971, Michael Blakemore joined the National Theatre as Associate Director under Laurence Olivier. The National, still based at the Old Vic, was at a moment of transition awaiting the move to its vast new home on the South Bank. Relying on generous subsidy, it would need an extensive network of supporters in high places. Olivier, a scrupulous and brilliant autocrat from a previous generation, was not the man to deal with these political ramifications. His tenure began to unravel and, behind his back, Peter Hall was appointed to replace him in 1973. As in other aspects of British life, the ethos of public service, which Olivier espoused, was in retreat. Having staged eight productions for the National, Blakemore found himself increasingly uncomfortable under Hall's regime. Stage Blood is the candid and at times painfully funny story of the events that led to his dramatic exit in 1976. He recalls the theatrical triumphs and flops, his volatile relationship with Olivier including directing him in Long Day's Journey into Night, the extravagant dinners in Hall's Barbican flat with Harold Pinter, Jonathan Miller and the other associates, the opening of the new building, and Blakemore's brave and misrepresented decision to speak out. He would not return to the National for fifteen years.

When Gaby Bailleux released the Angel Worm into Australia's prison system, allowing hundreds of asylum seekers to walk free, she also let the cat out of the bag. The Americans ran the prisons, like so many parts of her country, and so the doors of some 5000 American places of incarceration also opened. Both countries' secrets threatened to pour out.Was this a mistake, or had Gaby declared cyberwar on the US? Felix Moore - known to himself as 'Australia's last serving left wing journalist' - has no doubt. Her act was part of the covert conflict between Australia and America. That conflict dates back to the largely forgotten Battle of Brisbane in 1943, stretches forward to America's security interests in Pine Gap and commercial interests everywhere, and has as its most outrageous act the coup of 1975. Funded by his property-developer mate Woody Townes, Felix is going to write Gaby's biography, to save her, and himself, and maybe his country.But how to get Gaby to co-operate? What role does her film-star mother have to play? And what, after all, does Woody really want?