Books published by Faber & Faber

Michael Billington's engrossing biography examines Pinter's work in the context of his life. Through extended conversations with Pinter and interviews with his friends and colleagues, Billington creates a portrait of the man as well as the artist, from Pinter's Hackney childhood to his Nobel Prize, discussing his writing for stage and screen, as well as his fiction and poetry, his acting and directing, his political activity, his friendships, his two marriages and his passion for cricket. He emerges as a man of infinite complexity whose imaginative world is shaped by his private character. This new edition includes a full transcript of the Nobel lecture, as well as an additional chapter written in the aftermath of Harold Pinter's death in December 2008. 'The foremost representative of British drama in the second half of the twentieth century.' The Swedish Academy citation on awarding Harold Pinter the Nobel Prize for Literature, 2005'Enthralling... An open-sesame into Pinter's work... A valuable book. And absorbing: I found it virtually unputdownable.' Financial Times'No reader of this book will doubt that its subject is a man of the highest artistic stature.' Sunday Telegraph

John McGahern is considered by many to be the most important Irish prose writer of the last fifty years. McGahern's short stories equal his finest novels, reflecting both the richness of the ordinary, and the extraordinary, in the lives of a variety of individuals: the jilted lover waiting with would-be writers in a Dublin pub on a summer evening; the bitter climax between a father and son as a marriage begins; the fortunes and misfortunes of the Kirkwood family; and many more.For this revised edition, completed shortly before his death, John McGahern edited and deleted a number of stories from the Collected Stories that first appeared in 1992. This is the authorised edition of a modern classic.'He writes with authority and gravity, and with an instinct for the most appropriate detail . . . His terse narrative seems free and full. He has the gift of being able to move fluently and unselfconsciously between a simple and a heightened style.' Times Literary Supplement'One of the greatest writers of our era.' Hilary Mantel, New Statesman

'Marvellous.' Susan Hill, The TimesElizabeth Reegan, after years of freedom - and loneliness - marries into the enclosed Irish village of her upbringing. The children are not her own; her husband is straining to break free from the servile security of the police force; and her own life, threatened by illness, seems to be losing the last vestiges of its purpose. Moving between tragedy and savage comedy, desperation and joy, John McGahern's first novel is one of haunting power.'The details are evoked with a scrupulous yet enhancing accuracy that reminds one of the young Joyce. He is astonishingly successful in penetrating the mind of a mature woman confronted with pain and death. Mr McGahern is the real thing.' Spectator

The Dark, John McGahern's second novel, is set in rural Ireland. The themes - that McGahern has made his own - are adolescence and a guilty, yet uncontrollable sexuality that is contorted and twisted by both a puritanical state religion and a strange, powerful and ambiguous relationship between son and widower father.Against a background evoked with quiet, undemonstrative mastery, McGahern explores with precision and tenderness a human situation, superficially very ordinary, but inwardly an agony of longing and despair.'It creates a small world indelibly and without recourse to deliberate heightening effects of prose. There are few writers whose work can be anticipated with such confidence and excitement.' Sunday Times'One of the greatest writers of our era.' Hilary Mantel, New Statesman

A day, crucial and cathartic, in the life of a young Catholic schoolteacher who has returned to Ireland after a year's sabbatical in London where he married an American divorcee. As a result he now faces certain dismissal by the school authorities. Moving from the earliest memories of both the man and the woman, the novel recreates their breaking of the shackles of guilt and duty into the acceptance of a fulfilling adult love.

That They May Face the Rising Sun was the last novel from John McGahern, one of Ireland's greatest novelists. Joe and Kate Ruttledge have come to Ireland from London in search of a different life. In passages of beauty and truth, the drama of a year in their lives and those of the memorable characters that move about them unfolds through the action, the rituals of work, religious observances and play. We are introduced, with deceptive simplicity, to a complete representation of existence - an enclosed world has been transformed into an Everywhere.

'As wise and compelling a book as any of his elegiac and graceful novels.' David MitchellThis is the story of John McGahern's childhood; of his mother's death, his father's anger and bafflement, and his own discovery of literature.'Long before Frank McCourt made an entire industry out of twinkly eyed accounts of the poverty and institutionalised brutality of mid-twentieth-century rural Ireland, John McGahern, Ireland's greatest living novelist, had already shone wise and unsparing light on this same world ... Memoir is the full, unadorned story of his childhood and adolescence in Leitrim ... His finest book yet.' Stephanie Merritt, Observer'In a tremendously distinguished career, he has never written more movingly, or with a sharper eye.' Andrew Motion, Guardian'I have admired, even loved, John McGahern's work since his first novel ... Memoir strips the skin off his fiction as he faces a desperate early life with great force and tenderness.' Melvyn Bragg

'Every sentence sparkles with wit and charm . . . An intoxicating cocktail of fine science writing.' Richard Dawkins, author of The God DelusionAn inspiring and imaginative tour through the basics of science, from astronomy to biology and beyond. New York Times science writer Natalie Angier argues that this neglected canon should be essential knowledge - like Shakespeare, Beethoven or Picasso - for any cultured person, and The Canon makes these scientific fundamentals both exciting and easy to understand.'Delightful and witty ... Angier proves that our lives are enriched when we start understanding what science is all about.' Michael Taube, Financial Times'The kind of science book you wish someone had placed in front of you at school.' Tim Adams, Observer'Think you don't need this elegant primer on the basics of science? Go on, then - explain what electricity is, or DNA . . . See, told you so.' Tatler 'The best introduction to essential science I've read for many a year' John Cornwell, Sunday Times'Angier conveys the real substance of field after field, without distortion or dumbing down . . . I hope it is widely read.' Steven Pinker, New York Times

In May 1915, Italy declared war on the Habsburg Empire, hoping to seize its 'lost' territories of Trieste and Tyrol. The result was one of the most hopeless and senseless modern wars - and one that inspired great cruelty and destruction. Nearly three-quarters of a million Italians - and half as many Austro-Hungarian troops - were killed. Most of the deaths occurred on the bare grey hills north of Trieste, and in the snows of the Dolomite Alps. Outsiders who witnessed these battles were awestruck by the difficulty of attacking on such terrain. General Luigi Cadorna, most ruthless of all the Great War commanders, restored the Roman practice of 'decimation', executing random members of units that retreated or rebelled. Italy sank into chaos and, eventually, fascism. Its liberal traditions did not recover for a quarter of a century - some would say they have never recovered. Mark Thompson relates this nearly incredible saga with great skill and pathos. Much more than a history of terrible violence, the book tells the whole story of the war: the nationalist frenzy that led up to it, the decisions that shaped it, the poetry it inspired, its haunting landscapes and political intrigues; the personalities of its statesmen and generals; and also the experience of ordinary soldiers - among them some of modern Italy's greatest writers. A work of epic scale, The White War does full justice to one of the most remarkable untold stories of the First World War.

The protagonist of Hanif Kureishi's delightful novel is Gabriel, a fifteen-year-old North London schoolboy trying to come to terms with a new life, after the equilibrium of his family home has been shattered by the ousting of his father.Fending for himself, as well as providing emotional support to his confused (and confusing) parents, Gabriel is forced to grow up quickly. The only support he can draw upon is from his remembered twin brother, Archie, and from his own 'gift', which is accompanied by sensations that urge him into areas of life requiring the utmost courage and faith. A chance visit to seventies rock star Lester Jones crystallizes the turbulent emotions inside Gabriel, and helps him to recognize and engage with his gift . . .'A charming, light-textured fable about talent, about how single-minded creativity might embrace and even be buoyed by the heartbreaking muddle of everyday life.' Observer

Jamal Khan, a psychoanalyst in his fifties living in London, is haunted by memories of his teens: his first love, Ajita; the exhilaration of sex, drugs and politics; and a brutal act of violence which changed his life for ever. As he and his best friend Henry attempt to make the sometimes painful, sometimes comic transition to their divorced middle age, balancing the conflicts of desire and dignity, Jamal's teenage traumas make a shocking reappearance in his present life.'A great comic writer and a peerless connoisseur of the human mystery.' Independent'A novel that describes with such elegant seriousness the fear of ageing, the inanition of pleasure, the survival of love, the longing to understand and be understood.' Sunday Telegraph'A vital, teeming, panoramic, immersive novel.' Time Out'There is more that is worth thinking about in Something to Tell You than in the work of almost any other current British novelist.' Evening Standard

By the Nobel Prize-winning author of The Remains of the Day and Never Let Me GoShortlisted for the Booker PrizeEngland, the 1930s. Christopher Banks has become the country's most celebrated detective, his cases the talk of London society. Yet one unsolved crime has always haunted him: the mysterious disappearance of his parents, in old Shanghai, when he was a small boy. Moving between inter-war London and Shanghai, When We Were Orphans is a remarkable story of memory, intrigue and the need to return.

Ever since an obscure Civil Servant called Stephen Summerchild fell to his death from a window in the Admiralty, rumours have circulated about a connection with some secret defence project. Now, as a television company reinvestigates the case, the Cabinet Office feels it may be prudent to make a reassessment of its own, in case of any sudden alarm at Number Ten.'A Landing on the Sun is not just a masterly novel in its own right, but a clever debunking of those off-the-peg Whitehall yarns ... Many novelists have tried to take the lid off the arcane world of the Civil Service. Frayn has done it as brilliantly and imaginitively as any of them.' Daily Telegraph'Comedy creeps up on A Landing on the Sun like bindweed, transforming what starts out as a thriller into a small masterpiece of the absurd.' Financial Times

Why not program computers to take over the really dull jobs that human beings have to do - such as praying and behaving morally? At the William Morris Institute of Automation Research they are doing just that to free mankind for the really stimulating and demanding tasks of living today - first and foremost the impending visit of Her Majesty the Queen to open its new wing. . . Michael Frayn is the celebrated author of fifteen plays including Noises Off, Copenhagen and Afterlife. His bestselling novels include Headlong, which was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize, Spies, which won the Whitbread Best Novel Award and Skios, which was longlisted for the Man Booker Prize. Tin Men, his first novel, is now a modern classic. Winner of the Somerset Maugham Award it explores computers, technology and automation with customary humour and wit.

Uncumber lives in a dystopian world where all humanity is divided in two - the Insiders and the Outsiders. The Insiders are privileged, with their every need catered to by somatic drugs, three-dimensional holovision and prolonged life. Uncumber lives in this luxurious world and is told that she must never go out into the dust and disease of the real world. Uncumber, however, is haunted by a restless and inquisitive spirit. When she falls in love with an Outsider, she decides to go exploring. . . Michael Frayn is the award-winning author of Headlong, which was shortlisted for the Booker Prize, Spies, which won the Whitbread Best Novel Award, and Skios, which was longlisted for the Booker Prize. 'A fairy tale of the future. . . Frayn handles his observations and inventions brilliantly' Guardian

The Russian Interpreter is a story about Raya, a mercurial Moscow blonde who speaks no English, and the affair she is embarking upon with Gordon Proctor-Gould, a visiting British businessman who speaks no Russian. They need an interpreter; which is how Paul Manning is diverted from writing his thesis at Moscow University to become involved in all the deceptions of love and East-West relations. After the death of Stalin in 1952, the Soviet Union opened its doors to the rest of the world and Michael Frayn was one of the first foreign students to enter the country. Drawing on his experience at Moscow University in the late 1950s, he brilliantly captures a country still recovering from the Second World War, racked with suspicion and intrigue, at once harsh and easy-going, lethargic and labour-intensive. Michael Frayn is the celebrated author of fifteen plays including Noises Off, Copenhagen and Afterlife. His bestselling novels include Headlong, which was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize, Spies, which won the Whitbread Best Novel Award and Skios, which was longlisted for the Man Booker Prize.

Stage Directions covers half a lifetime and the whole range of Frayn's theatrical writing, right up to a new piece about his latest play, Afterlife. It is also a reflection on his path into theatre: the 'doubtful beginnings' of his childhood, his subsequent scorn as a young man and, surprisingly late in life, his reluctant conversion. Whatever subjects he tackles, from the exploration of the atomic nucleus to the mechanics of farce, Michael Frayn is never less than fascinating, delightfully funny and charming. This book encapsulates a lifetime's work and is guaranteed to be a firm favourite with his legions of fans around the world.

Shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize Headlong begins when Martin Clay, a young would-be art historian, believes he has discovered a missing masterpiece. The owner of the painting is oblivious to its potential and asks Martin to help him sell it, leaving Martin with the chance of a lifetime: if he could only separate the painter from its owner, he would be able to perform a great public service, to make his professional reputation, perhaps even rather a lot of money as well. But is the painting really what Martin believes it to be? As Martin is drawn further into this moral and intellectual labyrinth, events start to spiral out of control . . . Shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize, Whitbread Novel Award and the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for fiction, Headlong is an ingeniously comic thriller that follows a young philosophy lectuerer's obsessive race through the art world in search of an elusive masterpiece. Michael Frayn's other novels include Spies, which won the Whitbread Best Novel award, and Skios, which was longlisted for the Booker Prize.

The Peverell Press, a two-hundred-year-old publishing firm housed in a dramatic mock-Venetian palace on the Thames, is certainly ripe for change. But the proposals of its ruthlessly ambitious new managing director, Gerard Etienne, have made him dangerous enemies - a discarded mistress, a neglected and humiliated author, and rebellious colleagues and staff. When Gerard's body is discovered bizarrely desecrated, there is no shortage of suspects and Adam Dalgliesh and his team are confronted with a puzzle of extraordinary complexity and a murderer who is prepared to strike again. P.D. James, the bestselling author of Death Comes to Pemberley, Children of Men and Death in Holy Orders, once again explores the mysterious, strong and intense emotions responsible for the unique crime of murder, with authority and sensitivity. Original Sin is set in the literary world of London and possesses all of the qualities which distinguish P.D. James as a novelist. P.D. James has been influential as a crime writer for many years and her writing is often compared to the work of authors such as Val Mcdermid, Ian Rankin and Peter Robinson.

Two men lie in a welter of blood in the vestry of St Matthew's Church, Paddington, their throats brutally slashed. One is Sir Paul Berowne, a baronet and recently-resigned Minister of the Crown, the other an alcoholic vagrant. Dalgliesh and his team, set up to investigate crimes of particular sensitivity, are faced with a case of extraordinary complexity as they discover the Berowne family's veneer of prosperous gentility conceals ugly and dangerous family secrets. P.D. James, the bestselling author of Death Comes to Pemberley, Children of Men and The Murder Room, explores the mysterious and intense emotions responsible for the unique crime of murder, with authority and sensitivity. A Taste For Death, won the Silver Dagger award for crime fiction and was adapted into a BBC television series starring Robert Marsden as the inspector protagonist Adam Dalgliesh.

Philippa Palfrey, adopted as a child, believes herself to be the motherless, illegitimate daughter of an aristocratic father. At eighteen she exercises her right to find out the truth. What she discovers will change her life forever. Philippa embarks on a thrilling investigation, enters a new and terrifying world and soon comes to realize that she is not the only one interested in her parents' whereabouts. From the bestselling author of Death Comes to Pemberley, Children of Men and Death in Holy Orders, Innocent Blood is both a mystery and a thriller, a superb novel that explores the themes of self-identity, blood ties, guilt and revenge. P.D. James has been influential as a crime writer for many years and her writing is often compared to the work of authors such as Val Mcdermid, Ian Rankin and Peter Robinson. 'A fascinating psychological study of blood ties, guilt and revenge' Sunday Telegraph

From P.D. James, one of the masters of British crime fiction comes the second novel to feature the famous female detective Cordelia Gray of the Pryde Detective Agency. Set on the sinister Courcy Island, An Unsuitable Job for a Woman is a thrilling murder mystery. Clarissa Lisle hopes to make a spectacular comeback in a production of The Duchess of Malfi, to be played in Ambrose Gorringe's sinister castle at Courcy Island. Cordelia is there to ensure her safety following the appearance of a number of poison-pen letters. But it soon becomes clear that all are in danger. Trapped within the walls of the Gothic castle, the treacherous past of the island re-emerges, and everyone seems to have a motive for sending Clarissa 'down, down to hell'. Marking the return of the private detective Cordelia Gray, The Skull beneath the Skin is the sequel to An Unsuitable Job for a Woman. P.D. James is Britain's pre-eminent crime writer and the author of many bestselling titles including Death Comes To Pemberley, Children of Men and Death in Holy Orders.

Meet Cordelia Gray: twenty-two, tough, intelligent and now sole inheritor of the Pryde Detective Agency. Her first assignment finds her hired by Sir Ronald Callender to investigate the death of his son Mark, a young Cambridge student found hanged in mysterious circumstances. Cordelia is required to delve into the hidden secrets of the Callender family and soon realizes it is not a case of suicide, and that the truth is entirely more sinister. PD James is the bestselling author of Death Comes To Pemberley, Children of Men and The Murder Room. Her first Cordelia Gray novel An Unsuitable Job For a Woman is a brilliant work of crime fiction packed with secrets and suspense. This novel has been adapted for television twice, the second adaptation in 1997 starred Helen Baxendale as Cordelia Gray.

Aurelio Zen was dead to the world. Under the next umbrella, a few desirable metres closer to the sea, Massimo Rutelli was just dead.Inspector Zen is back, but nobody's supposed to know it. After months in hospital recovering from a bomb attack on his car, he is lying low under a false name at a beach resort on the Tuscan coast, waiting to testify in an imminent anti-Mafia trial. But when an alarming number of people are dropping dead around him, it seems just a matter of time before the Mafia manages to finish the job it bungled months before on a lonely Sicilian road. The pleasant monotony of resort life is cut short as Zen finds himself transported to a remote and strange world far from home...and wherever he goes, trouble follows.If you enjoyed the Inspector Zen Mystery series you may also like The Last Sherlock Holmes Story, another crime novel by Michael Dibdin.

The site where the body had been found was within the territory of the provincia di Catania, and hence under the jurisdiction of the authorities of that city. So far, so good. From a bureaucratic point of view, however, the crucial factor was where and when the crime - if indeed it was a crime - had occurred. As all those concerned were soon to learn, none of these points was susceptible of a quick or easy answer.Zen finally receives the order he has been dreading all his professional life: his next posting to Sicily.The gruesome discovery of an unidentified, decomposed corpse sealed in a railway wagon marks the beginning of Zen's most difficult and dangerous murder case. Set against the backdrop of Catania, in the shadow of the smouldering volcano of Etna, Blood Rain is a riveting tale of violence and murder, which reveals Aurelio Zen at his most desperate and driven.If you enjoyed the Inspector Zen Mystery series you may also like The Last Sherlock Holmes Story, another crime novel by Michael Dibdin.

Karen and I on the sofa, Karen and I in the back seat of the BMW, Karen and I at the river, up the alley, down the garden, round the corner, in the pub. Our movements are furtive, frantic and compulsive. Our pleasures are brief and incomplete. Our frustrations are enormous. Because if you look closely at the background of every scene, you'll see Dennis.Dennis and Karen lead a pleasant life in North Oxford until the day one of their dinner guests seduces Karen in the kitchen, setting in motion a chain of events which will destroy the thin veneer of their respectability and lead to ruthless murder.Dirty Tricks is a brilliant thriller set in contemporary Oxford: a gripping story of sex, ambition and violence with a wickedly humorous twist.If you enjoyed Dirty Tricks you may also like A Rich Full Death, another crime novel by Michael Dibdin.

Perugia, he thought. Chocolates, Etruscans, that fat painter, radios and gramophones, the University for Foreigners, sportswear. 'Umbria, the green heart of Italy', the tourist advertisements said. What did that make Latium, he had wondered, the bilious liver?Police Commissioner Aurelio Zen has crossed swords with the establishment before - and lost. But from the depths of a mundane desk job in Rome he is unexpectedly transferred to Perugia to take over an explosive kidnapping case involving one of Italy's most powerful families.If you enjoyed the Inspector Zen Mystery series, you may also like The Last Sherlock Holmes Story, another crime novel by Michael Dibdin.

Such a Long Journey is set in (what was then) Bombay against the backdrop of war in the Indian subcontinent and the birth of Bangladesh, telling the story of the peculiar way in which the conflict impinges on the lives of Gustad Noble, an ordinary man, and his family.It was the brilliant first novel by one of the most remarkable writers to have emerged from the Indian literary tradition in many years. It was shortlisted for the 1991 Booker Prize, and won the 1992 Commonwealth Writers Prize.

Surprises can be good, like my brand new hamster ball or a surprise party. But surprises can be bad, like coming whisker to whisker with a cat (EEK!) or having an alien from another planet move into Room 26. All this and LOTS-LOTS-LOTS more happens in my new book of adventures, Surprises According to Humphrey.

Join Humphrey the hamster for his third adventure - and this one is going to be packed with trouble! When all sorts of problems crop up in the classroom, from Pay-Attention-Art's marks going down, to Golden-Miranda finding herself in big trouble, Humphrey must step in to lend a helping paw. Using his charm, resourcefulness and wisdom, he's certain to have a plan. This third instalment follows the brilliantly successful The World According to Humphrey and Friendship According to Humphrey.