Books published by Faber & Faber

Astha has everything an educated, middle-class Delhi woman could ask for - children, a dutiful loving husband, and comfortable surroundings. So why should she be consumed with a sense of unease and dissatisfaction?Astha finds herself embarking on a powerfully physical relationship with a much younger woman, Pipee, the widow of a political activist. But with this extra-marital affair is she foolishly jeopardizing everything - or is Astha at last throwing off the fear and timidity instilled in her by her parents, her husband, her social class?Manju Kapur, celebrated author of the prize-winning Difficult Daughters, has written a seductive and beautifully honest story of love and betrayal, set at a time of on-going political and religious upheaval. Told with great sympathy and intelligence, and without a shred of sentimentality, A Married Woman is a story for anyone who has felt trapped by life's responsibilities.

When their traditional business - selling saris - is increasingly sidelined by the new fashion for jeans and stitched salwar kameez, the Banwari Lal family must adapt. But instead of branching out, the sons remain apprenticed to the struggling shop and the daughters are confined to the family home. As envy and suspicion grip parents and children alike, the need for escape - whether through illicit love or in the making of pickles or the search for education - becomes ever stronger. Very human and hugely engaging, Home is a masterful novel of the acts of kindness, compromise and secrecy that lie at the heart of every family.

One of the most acclaimed novels of recent times, The Underground Man is the fictionalised diary of a deeply eccentric English aristocrat. The duke has just completed a network of tunnels beneath his estate. His health is failing, but his imagination seems to know no bounds. And while he spends more time underground and retreats ever deeper into the darker corners of his house there are some ghosts that demand to be acknowledged and some memories which insist on making themselves known.

Something strange is going on in the village. A dead pig is carried through the lanes in a coffin, a heap of signposts are buried in a field and a mummy walks the streets late at night, scaring the local ladies half to death. Things have never been the same since the evacuee arrived and the Five Boys mistook him for a Nazi spy. It is as if someone is out for revenge. The village has had a whole host of visitors since: the Americans are down the road preparing for D-Day and a deserter is hiding out in the woods. But it is the arrival of the Bee King which makes the biggest impression. He is a law unto himself, has his own strange rituals and the villagers fear that he is beginning to exert the same charm over their boys as he does over his bees. The second novel by the highly acclaimed author of The Underground Man confirms Mick Jackson's originality and talent.

'Vastly original. Bessy is surely one of the most striking characters in recent fiction: cynical, disruptive, tender and very, very funny.' Independent on SundayShortlisted for the Orange PrizeScotland, 1863. In an attempt to escape her past, Bessy Buckley takes a job working as a maid in a big country house. But when Arabella, her beautiful mistress, asks her to undertake a series of bizarre tasks, Bessy begins to realise that she hasn't quite landed on her feet. In one of the most acclaimed debuts of recent years, Jane Harris has created a heroine who will make you laugh and cry as she narrates this unforgettable story about secrets and suspicions and the redemptive power of love and friendship.

When the body of a Russian agent is found down a monastery well, Yashim knows exactly who to blame. Fevzi Ahmet Pasha, commander of the Ottoman fleet.Years ago, when Yashim first entered the sultan's service, Fevzi Ahmet was his mentor. Ruthless, cruel, and - in Yashim's eyes - ultimately ineffective, he is the only man who makes him afraid. And now Yashim must confront the secret that Fevzi Pasha has been keeping all these years, a secret whose roots lie deep in the tortured atmosphere of the sultan's harem, where normal rules are suspended, and women can simply disappear.Once again, Yashim and his friends encounter treachery and politics, played out against the backdrop of 1840s Istanbul.

Yashim is no ordinary detective. It's not that he's particularly brave. Or that he cooks so well, or reads French novels. Not even that his best friend is the Ambassador from Poland, whose country has vanished from the map.Yashim is a eunuch.As the Sultan plans a series of radical reforms to his empire, a concubine is strangled in the palace harem. And a young cadet is found butchered in the streets of Istanbul. Delving deep into the city's crooked alleyways, and deeper still into its tumultuous past, Yashim discovers that some people will go to any lengths to preserve the traditions of the Ottoman Empire.Brilliantly evoking Istanbul in the 1830s, The Ottoman Detective is a fast-paced literary thriller with a spectacular cast, from mystic orders and lissom archivists to soup-makers and a seductive ambassador's wife. Darker than any of these is the mysterious figure who controls theSultan's harem.

A new one-volume edition of this classic sequence of sea novels set in the early nineteenth century, about a voyage from England to Australia.Rites of Passage (Winner of the Booker Prize)'The work of a master at the full stretch of his age and wisdom.' The TimesClose Quarters'A feat of imaginative reconstruction, as vivid as a dream.' Daily MailFire Down Below'Laden to the waterline with a rich cargo of practicalities and poetry, pain and hilarity, drama and exaltation.'Sunday Times

Rich in invention, psychological truth and sheer entertainment, the five short novels that comprise The Avignon Quintet form one of the key works of an undisputed modern master.'Another constellation of Mediterranean mysteries and memories. This time it is not Alexandria, but Avignon: the old kingdom of the Popes, the capital of the ancient South of France, the heart of legendary Provence . . . The evocation of all of this is superb . . . Our old guide bleu in vintage form.' The Times

Julius Winsome lives in a cabin in the hunting heartland of the Maine woods, with only his books and his dog for company. That is until the morning he finds that his dog has been shot dead - and not by accident. Gerard Donovan weaves an extraordinary tale of revenge that is also a tender and heartbreaking paean to lost love. Narrated by the unforgettable voice of Julius himself - at once compassionate, vulnerable and threatening - it reads like a timeless, lost classic.

Arlington Park, a modern-day English suburb, is a place devoted to the profitable ordinariness of life. Amidst its leafy avenues and comfortable houses, its residents live out the dubious accomplishments of civilisation: material prosperity, personal freedom, and moral indifference. For all that, Arlington Park is strikingly conventional. Men work, women look after children, and people generally do what's expected of them. Theirs is a world awash with contentment but empty of belief, and riven with strange anxieties. Set over the course of a single rainy day, the novel moves from one household to another, and through the passing hours conducts a deep examination of its characters' lives: of Juliet, enraged at the victory of men over women in family life; of Amanda, warding off thoughts of death with obsessive housework; of Solly, who confronts her own buried femininity in the person of her Italian lodger; of Maisie, despairing at the inevitability with which beauty is destroyed; and of Christine, whose troubled, hilarious spirit presides over Arlington Park and the way of life it represents.Rachel Cusk's sixth novel is her best yet. Full of compassion and wit, each page laden with truth, she writes about her characters' domestic lives, their private thoughts and fears with an intelligence and insight that will leave readers reeling.

Michael first met the Hanburys of Egypt Hill when he was a young student. He was intrigued and delighted by their bohemian lifestyle and bravado. Twelve years later, married with a young son, Michael is invited back to the house and jumps at the chance of escaping his increasingly turbulent domestic situation. But his illusions about the family are shattered as the rotten core of the Hanbury myth is gradually revealed. Intimate in its insight, epic in its emotional scope, In the Fold is a brilliant, clever, often painful story of how we can become undone by our yearning to belong.

Set in contemporary India, Love and Longing in Bombay confirms Vikram Chandra as one of today's most exciting young writers. In five haunting tales he paints a remarkable picture of Bombay - its ghosts, its passions, its feuds, its mysteries - while exploring timeless questions of the human spirit.'When Midnight's Children first arrived on the scene, it became necessary to revaluate stories from and about India. With Vikram Chandra's collection - his second book - it is time to take stock again . . . Breathtaking.' Observer

Peter Carey's novel of the undeclared love between clergyman Oscar Hopkins and the heiress Lucinda Leplastrier is both a moving and beautiful love story and a historical tour de force set in Victorian times. Made for each other, the two are gamblers - one obsessive, the other compulsive - incapable of winning at the game of love.Oscar and Lucinda is now available as a Faber Modern Classics edition.

Seven-year-old Che was abandoned by his radical Havard-student parents during the upheaval of the 1960s, and since then has been raised in isolated privilege by his New York grandmother. He yearns to see or hear news of his famous outlaw parents, but his grandmother refuses to tell him anything.When a woman named Dial comes to collect Che, it seems his wish has come true: his mother has come back for him. But soon, they too are on the run, and Che is thrown into a world where nothing is what it seems.

Peter Carey is justly renowned for his novels, which have included the Booker Prize-winning titles Oscar and Lucinda and True History of the Kelly Gang. He is also a dazzling writer of short stories and this volume collects together all the stories from The Fat Man in History and War Crimes as well as three other stories not previously published in book form.The stories, persuasive and precisely crafted, reveal Carey to be a moralist with a sense of humour, a surrealist interested in naturalism and an urban poet delighting in paradox.

The day that Benny Catchprice was fired from the spare parts department of Catchprice Motors by his aunt Cathy was also the day that the Tax Inspector, Maria Takis, arrived to begin her long-overdue audit of the family business. But this is no ordinary investigation. Maria is eight months' pregnant, Granny Catchprice is at war with her offspring, and Benny, her grandson, wants to become an angel...

Norman Miller used to be one of Fleet Street's finest. Now he's a middle-aged, burned-out hack with a gift for the sensational story, the shouting tabloid lead. But as he reports on a series of brutal murders and sex crimes, he's forced to wonder whether he is just a witness - or part of some deeper pattern of cause and effect . . .'Remarkable . . . Devastating . . . Required reading for anyone interested in what British fiction should be doing today.' Stephen Amidon, Esquire

How does it feel to be never allowed to die? In his classic debut novel, Gordon Burn takes Britain's biggest selling vocalist of the 1950s and turns her story into an equation of celebrity and murder. Fictional characters jostle for space with real life stars - from John Lennon to Doris Day and Sammy Davis Jnr - as Burn, in a breathtaking act of appropriation, reinvents the popular culture of the post-war years. As beautifully written as it is disturbing, Alma Cogan remains a stingingly relevant exploration of the sad, dark underside of fame.'An extraordinary, unprecedented novel. Audacious, innovative and totally compelling.' William Boyd

Summer 2007 was an extraordinarily rich time for news. Floods. Foot and mouth. The disappearances of Tony Blair and Madeleine McCann. The arrival of Gordon Brown. Terror attacks in Glasgow. And Gordon Burn, artist, journalist and true-crime author, has taken the events from this bleak summer and turned them into an utterly unique novel about the way news is made, and how the media creates and manipulates the stories we see before us. A daring and thrilling novel from one of the most astute observers of celebrity and tragedy, that is sure to make the headlines itself.

Written over three months in 1946, Mercier and Camier was Beckett's first post-war work, and his first novel in French. He came to regard it as a practice piece, and set it aside to write his trilogy. Mercier et Camier was finally published in 1970, and in Beckett's English translation four years later. The eponymous heroes tramp around a city, then out of it, then back again. They are aimless, but there is something elusive that they should be doing. They arrange meetings, they drink, they argue, they discuss being shot of each other. They are preoccupied by the weather, by provisions, by a raincoat, by an umbrella, by a bicycle...'All of these ingredients in the later work are accompanied here, fleetingly, by those things in Beckett that we know but cannot really name, those things that occupy so much of the trilogy. Intangible things, traps in the mind, that voice we hear, the stop-start understanding, the ongoing bewilderment, the fear.' (Keith Ridgeway). George, said Camier, five sandwiches, four wrapped and one on the side. You see, he said, turning graciously to Mr Conaire, I think of everything. For the one I eat here will give me the strength to get back with the four others. Sophistry, said Mr Conaire. You set off with your five, wrapped, feel faint, open up, take one out, eat, recuperate, push on with the others. For all response, Camier began to eat. You'll spoil him, said Mr Conaire. Yesterday cakes, today sandwiches, tomorrow crusts and Thursday stones. Mustard, said Camier.

These four last prose fictions by Samuel Beckett were originally published individually, and their composition spanned the final decade of his life. In Company a solitary hearer lying in blackness calls up images from the far-off past. Ill Seen Ill Said meditates upon an old woman living out her last days alone in an isolated snow-bound cottage, watched over by twelve mysterious sentinels. In Worstward Ho, a breathless speaker unravels the sense of things, acting out the unending injunction to 'Try again. Fail again. Fail better.' And Stirrings Still, published in the Guardian a few months before Beckett's death in 1989, is the last prose work and testament of 'this great soothsayer of the age, and of the aged' (Christopher Ricks). The present edition includes several short prose texts (Heard in the Dark I & II, One Evening, The Way, Ceiling) which represent work in progress or works ancillary to the composition of these late masterpieces.

His first published work of fiction (1934), More Pricks Than Kicks is a set of ten interlocked stories, set in Dublin and involving their adrift hero Belacqua in a series of encounters, as woman after woman comes crashing through his solipsism. More Pricks contains in embryo the centrifugal world of Beckett's men and women. She lifted the lobster clear of the table. It had about thirty seconds to live. Well, thought Belacqua, it's a quick death, God help us all. It is not.

One of the most vivid and realised characters of recent fiction, Willie Dunne is the innocent hero of Sebastian Barry's highly acclaimed novel. Leaving Dublin to fight for the Allied cause as a member of the Royal Dublin Fusiliers, he finds himself caught between the war playing out on foreign fields and that festering at home, waiting to erupt with the Easter Rising. Profoundly moving, intimate and epic, A Long Long Way charts and evokes a terrible coming of age, one too often written out of history. 'A stunning achievement ... Barry has written one of the most moving fictional accounts of war that surely must rank alongside those real-life testimonies of Owen and Sasson.' Sunday Tribune'The story grips, shocks and saddens; but most importantly refuses to be forgotten.' The Times'In darkly beautiful, inventive and evocative prose Barry tells the filthy truths of war.' Ireland on Sunday'With disarming lyricism, Barry's novel leads the readers into a hellish no-man's-land, where the true madness of war can only be felt and understood rather than said.' Observer'[It] passionately documents a period of collective sacrifice and courage across Europe and beyond, as well as momentous political upheaval in Ireland.' Time Out'The most remarkable shared imaginative universe in Irish writing belongs to the poet, playwright and novelist Sebastian Barry who, like an archaeologist, has slowly and deftly delved back through his myriad ancestors to let them breathe again ... A Long Long Way is a major novel ... perhaps his greatest work.' Dermot Bolger, Sunday Independent'It is more mature, more modulated, more quietly challenging than any of his fiction heretofore, A Long Long Way therefore deserves to win for Barry a renewed attention.' Irish Times 'A deeply moving story of courage and fidelity' J M Coetzee'Many say Sebastian Barry writes like an angel and they are right, provided they remember he is on the side of the angels that fell. He shares his longing that his heroes might roar with a horrified I will not serve. But they do serve and are destroyed. Then his sympathy overwhelms, as it does in A Long Long Way. A possessed, powerful novel.' Frank McGuinness'This is Sebastian Barry's song of innocence and experience, composed with poetic grace and an eye, both unflinching and tender, for savage detail and moments of pure beauty. It is also an astonishing display of Barry's gift for creating a memorable character, whom he has written, indelibly, back into a history which continues to haunt us.' Colm Tobin'The story of young Willie Dunne, caught between the competing and irreconcilable loyalties of family, faith and fatherland, is tragic - as indeed the stories of so many young Irishmen who joined up in 1914 must have been, whether they died or lived. But even more powerful is Sebastian Barry's prose, which fuses the vernacular with the poetic, in a way that is lyrical and yet entirely apt. Willie Dunne's voice, like his dilemmas, has the resonance of authenticity.' Hew Strachan, author of The First World War'As always, I enjoyed the way in which Barry tells the Irish story from a reverse angle, from the un-easy, anti-heroic point of view. He proves once again that the artist makes the best historian, and that the tragic figures who are wrong-footed by history, provide the most compelling account of the past.' Hugo Hamilton

Following the end of the First World War, Eneas McNulty joins the British-led Royal Irish Constabulary. With all those around him becoming soldiers of a different kind, however, it proves to be the defining decision of his life when, having witnessed the murder of a fellow RIC policeman, he is wrongly accused of identifying the executioners. With a sentence of death passed over him he is forced to flee Sligo, his friends, family and beloved girl, Viv. What follows is the story of this flight, his subsequent wanderings, and the haunting pull of home that always afflicts him. Tender, witty, troubling and tragic, The Whereabouts of Eneas McNulty tells the secret history of a lost man.

In this acrobatic and virtuosic collection, Paul Auster traces the compulsion to make literature. In a selection of interviews, as well as in the essay 'The Red Notebook' itself, Auster reflects upon his own work, on the need to break down the boundary between living and writing, and on the use of certain genre conventions to penetrate matters of memory and identity. The Red Notebook both illuminates and undermines our accepted notions about literature, and guides us towards a finer understanding of the dangerously high stakes involved in writing. It also includes Paul Auster's impassioned essay 'A Prayer for Salman Rushdie', as well as a set of striking and bittersweet reminiscences collected under the apposite title, 'Why Write?'

'One day there is life . . . And then, suddenly, it happens there is death.'So begins Paul Auster's moving and personal meditation on fatherhood, The Invention of Solitude. The first section, 'Portrait of an Invisible Man', reveals Auster's memories and feelings after the death of his father. In 'The Book of Memory' the perspective shifts to Auster's role as a father. The narrator, 'A.', contemplates his separation from his son, his dying grandfather and the solitary nature of writing and story-telling. With all the keen literary intelligence familiar from The New York Trilogy or Sunset Park, Paul Auster crafts an intensely intimate work from a ground-breaking combination of introspection, meditation and biography.

'That is how it works in the City. Every time you think you know the answer to a question, you discover that the question makes no sense . . .'This is the story of Anna Blume and her journey to find her lost brother, William, in the unnamed City. Like the City itself, however, it is a journey that is doomed, and so all that is left is Anna's unwritten account of what happened.Paul Auster takes us to an unspecified and devastated world in which the self disappears amidst the horrors that surround us. But this is not just an imaginary, futuristic world: like the settings of Kafka stories, it is one that echoes our own, and in doing so addresses some of our darker legacies. In the Country of Last Things is a tense, psychological take on the dystopian novel. It continues Auster's deep exploration of his central themes: the modern city, the mysteries of storytelling, and the elusive and unstable nature of truth.

Why does every society around the world have a religious tradition of some sort? Professor Lewis Wolpert investigates the nature of belief and its causes. He looks at belief's psychological basis and its possible evolutionary origins in physical cause and effect. Wolpert explores the different types of belief - including that of animals, of children, of the religious, and of those suffering from psychiatric disorders. And he asks whether it is possible to live without belief at all, or whether it is a necessary component of a functioning society.

'An excellent book, the most objective short account I know of all the various approaches to depression.' Anthony Storr Several years ago, Lewis Wolpert had a severe episode of depression. Despite a happy marriage and successful scientific career, he could think only of suicide. When he did recover, he became aware of the stigma attached to depression - and just how difficult it was to get reliable information. With characteristic candour and determination he set about writing this book, an acclaimed investigation into the causes and treatments of depression, which formed the basis for a BBC TV series.This paperback edition features a new introduction, in which Wolpert discusses the reaction to his book and BBC series, and recounts his own recurring struggle with depression.