Books published by Faber & Faber

First published in 1954 as South to Sardinia, this account of a summer journey in the early 1950s sees Alan Ross alternating the past and present of a strange island whose interior, especially, had been only rarely visited at that point. His descriptions of the landscape and local customs and mores (including billiards, 'one of the great Sardinian occupations') are interspersed with tales of a cast of characters who might have come out of Boccaccio, adding up to a memorable evocation.'An alert and sensitive travel book... Alan Ross has an exceptional descriptive gift.' Listener'So closely packed with good writing that it requires to be read slowly, as Mr Ross travelled.' Time and Tide'He is a specialist in the vin triste... a delightful offbeat.' Cyril Connolly, Sunday Times'An exceptionally good book by any standard.' TLS'A work of art and imagination.' Times

Set in the world of a large advertising company Storyboard focuses on the decision by the agency's clients, Hoppness, Silch & Co. ('the soap people') to destroy one of their competitor's products. Into this scheme are thrust copyeditor Sophia Last and her boss Hugh Grover, as well as over-conscientious Account Executive Keith Bates, his wife Sylvia and their son Stephen. Also caught up in these events is Ralph Cavell, a young research graduate turned journalist. Storyboard is not primarily a novel about advertising. It is an exploration of how people can be corrupted, and ultimately destroyed, by their desire for money and power and how even those people who start out with good intentions can be misled from their original purpose. It is also a critique of powerful corporations that are controlled and organised by the greed of those who operate them.An absorbing and adult novel, Storyboard cemented John Bowen's reputation as a mature and intelligent novelist when it was first published in 1960.

First published in 1959 The Centre of the Green is John Bowen's third novel. The story centres around the Baker family: the father Justin is a retired Colonel; the mother, Teresa, is over-possessive and refuses to admit that her sons have grown-up; the sons Julian and Charles - one is a married advertising copywriter with a penchant for extra-marital affairs while the other is withdrawn and suicidal, desperately looking for human contact in the vast anonymity of London.It is Julian's involvement with a seventeen-year-old girl that sparks the chain of events that eventually encompasses the whole family. The scene shifts between Devonshire, London and Majorca as each member of the family searches for a resolution to the impasse into which they have drifted and struggle to regain the family ties that they once had. A subtle, intelligent and compassionate novel The Centre of the Green was commended by the Observer for its 'admirable vitality', while the Spectator described it as 'a series of expertly managed shocks'.

In John Bowen's The Birdcage Peter Ash and Norah Palmer have been living together for nine years. Having never seen the point in getting married they are the epitome of a modern successful career-oriented couple; Peter is the compere for a series of 'art' films and Norah is the Script Editor for the Drama Department of a commercial television company. Why then when holidaying in Venice does Peter decide to break up their long-lasting relationship? What happens to their order and sense of self when he succeeds? By turns wildly funny and frightening The Birdcage is a novel about the end of a love affair, the repercussions and the emotional fallout. A host of brilliantly created characters people the book, including Bunty Bates the policewoman, and Edward Laverick, a playwright who finds himself the object of a hunt. Bowen creates a world that his readers can relate to and analyses the social and psychological end of a relationship. At times comical and tragic The Birdcage remains an original and exciting novel 44 years after its first publication in 1964.

First published in 1958 After the Rain was described by Angus Wilson as a 'cataclysmic novel . . . as exciting as any deluge you can hope to find; but if you think deluges are too trivial, John Bowen has a surprise for you: his novel turns out to be satire of the first order.'Beginning in the basement of Foyle's bookshop in the Charing Cross Road in London and moving to rainmaking in Texas, love in Chew Magna, a camp in the Mendips, a storm at sea, sharks, sunstroke, a giant squid and a fight to the death on a raft, After the Rain is an adventure story that will keep you gripped to the very last page.An exhilarating, brilliantly conceived, sharply intelligent and often-funny story, it is a compassionate and well-imagined fable that makes a serious comment on the human situation and established John Bowen as a novelist of depth and skill, drawing comparisons with George Orwell and William Golding.

In this indispensable guide to digital film-making, leading film-maker Mike Figgis offers the reader a step-by-step tutorial in how to use digital technology so as to get the best from it.Mike Figgis, with experience from films such as Miss Julie and Leaving Las Vegas - for which he received two Oscar nominations - is an authoritative and insightful guide through the details of film-making. He outlines the equipment and its uses, and provides an authoritative guide to the shooting process - from working with actors to lighting, framing, and camera movement. He further dispenses wisdom on the editing process and the use of sound and music, all the while establishing a sound aesthetic basis for the digital format.This handbook is essential whether your goal is to make no-budget movies, or simply to put your video camera to more use than just holidays and weddings.

'King Ludwig has fascinated me ever since I was a child, yet fascination is not quite the right word. Fellow-feeling would be the proper phrase...' David Stacton, 1957With his fourth published novel - and his first on historical themes and personages - David Stacton's writing career took a decisive turn. Remember Me, over which he laboured for four years, is an extraordinarily vivid and felt portrait of the infamous Ludwig II of Bavaria, evoking with assurance the strange and poetic landscape that shaped him. Stacton described the book in genesis to his editor as 'a study in madness, of the regal temperament and its reflexes, pushed to that point when it has nothing but the past to govern.' 'A tour de force...An extraordinary feat of dreamlike identification. The compression is masterly.' Observer'[Stacton's] prose, alternating... between stabbing vigour and florid ornament, powerfully suggests the frustrations of that unhappy spirit.' Times Literary Supplement

Nick is stuffed in his locker. Again.It's not so bad. Lockers are roomier than you'd think.Especially when you're the shortest kid on the planet, which is exactly why Bully-Boy Roy stuffed him in there in the first place: he fits.The school counselor says Roy has issues. The only issue Nick can see is that Roy is a mutant troll.Nick's friends Molly and Karl think the troll needs to be defeated.Together, they are THE ODD SQUAD.If you want to laugh out loud, watch them beat the bullies and see some cool pictures, READ THIS BOOK!

N. F. Simpson was one of the leading exponents of the theatre of the absurd, and is best known for his play A Resounding Tinkle, made famous by its premiere at the Royal Court in 1957, and later to star Peter Cook. But beyond that he was a major force in the satire boom of the sixties, and wrote much exceptional comedy for film and TV for the likes of John Cleese, Beryl Reid, Hattie Jacques and Eric Sykes, as well as a number of brilliantly funny plays for theatre, which starred big names such as Harold Pinter and Kenneth Williams. His influence on everyone from Peter Cook's much-loved character E. L. Wisty to Monty Python's Flying Circus helped spawn a generation of incredible comic talent.Plays included in the collection are A Resounding Tinkle, The Hole, Gladly Otherwise, One Way Pendulum, The Cresta Run, Was He Anyone? and his final work, If So, Then Yes, first performed in 2010.This collection celebrates the work of this lost comic genius, and seeks to put his reputation back at the heart of British - and world - comedy.

Lieutenant Fred O'Connor of the NYPD Narcotics Bureau has a secret: an apartment on Central Park West, jointly purchased with ill-gotten gains by Fred and a corrupt fellow officer. The place is a refuge for Fred from a society he finds repellently ill-ordered. But his own equilibrium is disturbed, first by a series of brutal murders of his colleagues, then by the appearance at the apartment's door of wan Leo Smith, who claims to be the cop-killer...'Fleetwood is a compulsive pattern-maker, and a master of the ambiguous thread which finally pulls all together. It is a rich, gruesome, irresistibly readable book.' Times'Fleetwood can write like a dream... and really get into your head. He reaches down and stirs with venomous delight the nameless, faceless things swimming far below the level of consciousness.' Scotsman

The Man Who Went Down with His Ship (1988) finds Hugh Fleetwood moving from Manhattan and Paris to winter-bound London, from Tuscany and Sardinia to Mexico and Egypt. Yet wherever his characters roam, their fate awaits them like the proverbial appointment in Samarra. In the title story, poet Alfred Albers attempts to confront with honesty an event from his past that has always haunted him, only to learn anew that no good deed goes unpunished. In 'The Nature of Angels' Maria longs for deliverance from a life made moribund, but is finally forced to ponder exactly what kind of power would answer our prayersThis edition includes two later Fleetwood stories: 'L & I' and 'Why Are You Wearing My Daughter's Earrings?''[Fleetwood] reaches down and stirs with venomous delight the nameless, faceless things swimming far below the level of consciousness.' Scotsman

In an isolated Roman villa, widowed English dancer Barbara Michaels serves as paid companion and tutor to twenty year-old Catherine, whose rich American mother thinks her 'mad.' In Barbara's eyes it's simply the case that Catherine is not 'all there', and dwells too much in the dysfunctional part of her own head. Barbara's sense of what is and is not 'normal', however, is about to be overturned.First published in 1973, The Girl Who Passed for Normal was Hugh Fleetwood's second novel and the winner of the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize for its year. 'Guaranteed to keep you on the edge of your chair.' New York Times'Shocking... Horridly memorable.' San Francisco Chronicle

In this 1980 collection Hugh Fleetwood links four tales by a red thread of theme. Author Tina Courtland, having retired to the Italian countryside, is lured back to London to write the life of the only man she has ever admired. Andrew Stairs, who has spent his life refusing to set foot on foreign soil, is tempted by romance to try the risky unknown of 'abroad.' Walter Drake, a novelist cursed by a sense of the failure of his life's work, resolves bitterly to write his autobiography. And Fran Niebauer, a well-heeled patron of writers, is forced to reconsider her motives for this patronage.'Fleetwood can write like a dream... and really get into your head. He reaches down and stirs with venomous delight the nameless, faceless things swimming far below the level of consciousness.' Scotsman

Mrs Vidozza elects to suffer for her gifted, unhinged son; Charles is consumed by the habit of voyeurism; Antonietta succumbs to fascination with a murder she believes she has witnessed; sexuagenarian Daisy suborns herself for the sake of a young girl she imagines as a flower in an otherwise filthy world...In this 1978 collection Hugh Fleetwood gives a name to a theme running through his fictional oeuvreand the fates of his characters: that 'innocence' must as soon as possible be supplanted by awareness of the human capacity for horror, so that Beauty and the Beast are reconciled in our consciousness.'Fleetwood can write like a dream... and really get into your head. He reaches down and stirs with venomous delight the nameless, faceless things swimming far below the level of consciousness.' Scotsman

'Black comedy at its most lurid, refined, and raffish... Wilbur George has made court-jester parasitism into an art form: four creepy but wealthy fellow expatriates (who hate each other) contribute to the upkeep of his Roman villa and matchless dinner parties. And when ancient, horrid Pam decides to stop contributing, she dies - moments after taking tea with Wilbur... the three surviving patrons congratulate him on a good clean kill, praise which vain Wilbur can't quite bring himself to deny...' Kirkus Reviews'It is Hugh Fleetwood's great ability as a novelist to analyse the world of the rich, to test it with violence and to subtly probe its corruption.' Peter Ackroyd, Spectator'Artistically successful and enthralling... It shimmers for a long time in the memory's eye.' Glasgow Herald'Extremely readable and suitably chilling.' Jeremy Lewis, Times

Nancy meets Marcus at a party. He is untidy, nervous, shy: women have never paid him any attention. But here is virgin clay from which Nancy can mould her Adam. She marries him, and on their wedding night Marcus realises he is as much her protege in sex as in other fields. But soon he is confident that, under her guiding hands, he had been transformed into a consummate lover; and he begins to feel the urge to slip his leash.'Elegant, funny and erotic... a good showcase for [Brophy's] perceptions on life and art, her wit and her dazzling prose.' Telegraph'Sly and sophisticated and written in a deceptively simple manner.' Kirkus Reviews'Brophy has the enviable knack of combining precision with suggestiveness.' Saturday Review

The tweedy Miss Hetty Braid worships the lovely but selfish Miss Antonia Mount, her co-proprietor at the most exclusive finishing school on the French Riviera. The girls they teach are quite remarkable, though hardly in the sense of academic distinction. But trouble looms when Antonia announces that 'Royalty is coming.' The great day arrives, and though at first things go tolerably well, disaster springs from good intentions.This Faber Finds edition includes a 1987 introduction by Brigid Brophy and a new preface by Sir Peter Stothard.'A wicked little entertainment... plaubly not meant for the moralists or naive.' Evening Standard'An outrageously indelicate joke made in beautifully mannered prose.' Daily Herald'Waspish and witty.' TLS

'[Beardsley's] vision is permanently that of a child lying in bed watching his mother dress for a dinner-party. His fantasy hangs this here, tries the effect of that there: everything is a jewel, and everything is a sexual organ. He is allured, yet afraid to touch: driven back on a cold minuteness of detailed attention, and yet passionately curious, with the emotional and involved curiosity children give to sex.'Brigid Brophy first published her study of 'the most intensely and electrically erotic artist in the world' in 1968, at the height of her own powers and in the moment of a notable revival of interest - both scholarly and pop-cultural (amid 'the dandified realm of Carnavy Street') - in Beardsley's work.An infant prodigy, Beardsley retained through the brief years of his adult life the peculiar genius of a precocious child, and Brophy, well-versed in Freudian analyses, adroitly points out the polymorphous perversity of his pictures - that perversity, coupled with his inimitable graphic/monochromatic signature, accounting for why Beardsley, however 'high-baroque rococo' his style, has remained endlessly modern.Black and White is illustrated by 44 reproductions and augmented by a detailed chronology.

'The Thousand Deaths Of Mr Small is the best novel that Gerald Kersh has yet written... Charles Small, successful advertising expert and miserable man, turns over in his mind the 'stinking, sour, stagnant, untransmitted mass' which is his life... This book has a rich, warm quality; long and full of detail, it teems with humour, satire, incident, character; in a word, with life.' Yorkshire Post'It see-saws from side-splitting dialogue to such catalogues of loathing and revulsion as have rarely been seen in print, from outrageous farce to sudden compassion for the Smalls of this world, who find Hell enough in 'the eternal contemplation of themselves as they made themselves.'' New York Herald Tribune'With brilliant descriptive power and an emetic vocabulary, [Kersh] has produced a tormented and forceful work.' Commonweal

With The Song Of The Flea (1948) Gerald Kersh revisited the demi-monde of his famous Night And The City; but this novel concerns a writer, striving doggedly to make his living.'A remarkable novel... with this book Mr Kersh has taken a big step forward.' Sunday Times'[Kersh] has a remarkable talent... he is one of the comparatively few living novelists in this country who write with energy and originality and whose ideas are not drawn from a residuum of novels that have been written before... [The Song of the Flea] is the story of John Pym, a young man trying to earn his living as a writer... Mr Kersh draws on his picturesque and convincing knowledge of human vileness in a manner which is both entertaining and instructive.' Times Literary Supplement.

Night and the City (1938) made Gerald Kersh's reputation, but it was as a war novelist that he reached a wide readership in 1942, via a pair of books about British army recruits, led by Sergeant Bill Nelson, preparing to see service in France. This Faber Finds edition collects both books.'[They Die With Their Boots Clean] is a picture of life in the raw in the Coldstream Guards, with all itsrigorous discipline, its humour and comradeship.' TLS[In The Nine Lives Of Bill Nelson] the conversations are terse, ferociously slangy, full of hyperbole and outrageous wit, often irresistibly funny.' TLS

'[This] is the story of the beginning and the end of St Paul, that most complicated and worrying of all the saints. The narrator is Diomed, a colonial officer stationed at Tarsus, enlightened, intelligent, a great fraterniser with the patrician natives, [who] sends the strange young Jew to persecute the Nazarenes... [Kersh brings] a highly concentrated area of Roman colonial history to very real life - the ornate wine-cup, the crapulous cold fruit-juice at dawn, dust on a sandal... King Jesus is here, all the time... the fly-itch nuisance to the Empire that wakes its prefects up in nightmare... This is a masterly book, full of live people and a live age, live language, too... We may adjudge Mr Kersh, after reading The Implaccable Hunter, to be now at the height of his powers.' Anthony Burgess, Yorkshire Post, 1961

'It is a quality of flamboyant vigour in Mr Kersh that wins attention first of all for his fiction, and more especially, perhaps, for his occasional short story. When his flamboyant energy of sentiment and language comes off he achieves an effect of genuine distinction; at his surest, that is, he is a short story writer of a strongly individual and rewarding kind... the best and cleverest [of the 23 stories in this volume] tells with excellent economy of a ventriloquist's dummy which was inhabited, or so it seemed, by the spirit of the ventriloquist's murdered father... 'The Drunk And The Blind', the sketch of an old, battered and mentally ruined boxer, is done with a telling and slightly brutal power. 'The Devil That Troubled The Chess-Board'... is another sound thing in a vein of the slightly macabre.' Times Literary Supplement (1944)

'[Gerald Kersh] is a story-teller of an almost vanished kind - though the proper description is perhaps a teller of 'rattling good yarns'... He is fascinated by the grotesque and the bizarre, by the misfits of life, the angry, the down-and-outs and the damned. A girl of eight commits a murder. Some circus freaks are shipwrecked on an island. A chess champion walks in his sleep and destroys the games he has so carefully planned...' TLS 'Beneath his talented lightness and fantasy, Gerald Kersh is a serious man... [He] has the ability... to create a world which is not realistic and which is yet entirely credible and convincing on its own fantastic terms.' New York Times 'Mr Kersh tells a story; as such, rather better than anybody else.' Pamela Hansford Johnson, Telegraph

'Charlie Smith is only one of many similar men who are at this moment living unhappily among us, or are confined in prison now but must sooner or later be released.'The Unknown Citizen (1963) was Tony Parker's second study of a criminal recidivist.'Mr Parker's very moving book tells what happened the day Charlie left prison and in his first year of freedom. Charlie himself contributes a pitiful attempt at a self-portrait. We have the author's conversations with the magistrate who sentenced him, with his sorely tried elder sister and with others who have come into his life in the last 18 months... The final chapter is masterly... This is literature, not just another book on crime.' D.L. Howard, Telegraph

Few crimes provoke such outrage and upset as the sex offence, making the subject - including the problems it poses to our society and criminal justice system - a natural one for sociologist Tony Parker, whose work consistently shed light into dark corners of human behaviour. The Twisting Lane, first published in 1969, presents the testimonies of eight men aged between 20 and 70 who had been convicted - most of them repeatedly - for eight different types of offence, from assault or rape of adults or minors, to indecent exposure and 'living on immoral earnings'. Each man offers, in his own words, his personal story and self-perception.'A remarkable achievement... almost every paragraph is poignant and revealing.' New Statesman

For his twelfth book, first published in 1985, Tony Parker was given near-unlimited access by the Ministry of Defence and spent eighteen months interviewing the officers and soldiers of a single British Army infantry regiment - as well as their wives. Both a pacifist and a former conscientious objector, Parker brought his singular perspective to the questioning of fighting men on what it means to bear arms for one's country.'A unique picture of a social institution which is an exaggerated microcosm of society and yet set apart from it.' Scotsman'A revealing glimpse into the lives and thoughts of the men in khaki.' Gerald Kaufman, Manchester Evening News'Captivating bedside reading.' Sunday Telegraph

'Those of you who have read Tony Parker's book The Plough Boy will be familiar with the story of Michael Davies. He was one of six youths concerned in an affray in which a boy was killed. Five of them received short terms of imprisonment, but Davies was condemned to death... The door to the execution shed was the first thing he saw when he opened his eyes every morning. That boy spent 92 days in the condemned cell watching that door before he was reprieved. I hope we can agree that torture of that kind shall never again be inflicted in Britain.'Baron Stonham, in the Lords debate on the Murder (Abolition of Death Penalty) Bill, 19 July 1965

'People of the streets... you become aware of them, and wonder who and what they are... what kind of lives they have, and what living them means...' First published in 1968, People of the Streets was Tony Parker's sixth book, for which he spent a year approaching and interviewing people in London who were living their daily lives on street corners, along gutters or in subways. With his usual skill he coaxed them out of their natural reticence, born of solitude, into an unfamiliar but hugely illuminating spontaneity.'In [Parker's] books the strength lies in the interpretive mind of the writer... He is a sociologist studying single cases in some depth and shows qualities of imagination shared by the historian and the biographer - a mixture of intelligence, sympathy and empathy.' TLS

First published in 1967, A Man of Good Abilities was Tony Parker's fifth book, and told the story of 65 year-old 'Norman Edwards', a compulsive swindler-embezzler for his whole adult life, one punctuated by numerous ineffective terms of imprisonment. Using journals, letters, and interview transcripts Parker drew a finessing portrait of a man and a seemingly intractable problem that he posed to society.'Tony Parker is a remarkably skilled and compassionate exponent of the documentary technique that he uses to illumine human character; with him, tape-recorded conversations are the stuff of art, not of mere photography.' New Society'In his books the strength lies in the interpretive mind of the writer... He is a sociologist studying single cases in some depth and shows qualities of imagination shared by the historian and the biographer - a mixture of intelligence, sympathy and empathy.' TLS