NEW RELEASES
In middle age, a writer finds herself despairing and uncomprehending at how modern Britain has become a place of such greed and indifference. In an attempt to understand her country and her species, she and her lover rent a van and journey across France to the Mediterranean, across Italy to the Balkans and Greece and on to the islands. To travel through space is also to travel through time: along the way, they drive through the Norman Conquest, the Hundred Years War, the wars with the Huguenots, the fragility of the Italian Renaissance, the Balkan wars of the 1990s and the current refugee crisis, meeting figures from Europe's political and artistic past — a Norman knight, Joan of Arc, Ariosto, d'Annunzio and Alan Moore's nihilistic Rorschach, each lending their own view of humanity at its best and at its very worst. Very interesting.
"The closer they get to their destination, the further they are from finding any definitive answers, and even the questions have become elusive. But this shifting, unsure quality, made luminous with an extraordinary descriptive brilliance, emerges as the book’s strength." —Guardian
"A masterclass in the short story — bold, irreverent and agonisingly funny'." - Sally Rooney
“Flattery tells the truth but tells it slant, so that from her sentences, to her symbolism, to her zany, often surrealist plots, her stories fizz with humour and surprise. Flattery's writing — as subversive as it is original — has more than charm; acknowledging the terror, it celebrates the joy of humour in a hollow, imploding world.” —Irish Independent
“If tradition is the kitchen sink, Flattery removes it from the wall, smashes it to pieces, and dances all over it with delight. With a literary voice that is as sophisticated and erudite as it is spiky and hilarious, Flattery has taken the short story format into an exciting, energetic, and multifaceted dimension.” —Sunday Independent
>>Flattery reads.
Every year on Leila’s birthday Shalini kneels by the wall with a little yellow spade and scoops dry earth to make a pit for two candles. One each for herself and for Riz, the husband at her side. But as Shalini walks from the patch of grass where she held her vigil the man beside her melts away. It is sixteen years since they took her, her daughter’s third birthday party, the last time she saw the three people she loves most dearly: her mother, her husband, her child.
"Intelligent, chilling and deeply moving." —Kamila Shamsie
"Leila does for the barbarity of contemporary Indian nationalism what The Handmaid's Tale did for the yoke of patriarchy. It is urgent, gripping, topical, disturbing, and announces a talent we'll be talking about for years to come." —Neel Mukherjee
A fascinating insight into how a publisher can not only publish important books (and unimportant ones), but also shift cultural conversation and change the way we engage with literature.
>>Visit the Faber archive.
A novel taking the form of a letter from a son to a mother who cannot read. Written when the speaker, Little Dog, is in his late twenties, the letter unearths a family’s history that began before he was born — a history whose epicenter is rooted in Vietnam — and serves as a doorway into parts of his life his mother has never known, all of it leading to an unforgettable revelation. At once a witness to the fraught yet undeniable love between a single mother and her son, it is also a brutally honest exploration of race, class, and masculinity.
“A lyrical work of self-discovery that’s shockingly intimate and insistently universal. Not so much briefly gorgeous as permanently stunning.” —The Washington Post
In 1945, as the army retreated, the German people were surrendered to the enemy with no means of defence. A wave of suicides rolled across the country as thousands chose death — for themselves and their children — rather than face the defeat of the Third Reich and what they feared might follow. Drawing on eyewitness accounts, Huber tells of the largest mass suicide in German history and its suppression by the survivors-a fascinating insight into the feelings of ordinary people caught in the tide of history who saw no other way out.
The earliest evidence of a human and a pet can be traced as far back as 26,000 BC in France where a boy and his 'canid' took a walk through a cave. Their foot and paw prints were preserved together on the muddy cave floor, and smoke from the torch the boy carried was left on the walls, allowing archaeologists to carbon-date their journey. And so, the story unfolds, from these prehistoric days all the way up to the present, of our innate and undeniable need to live in the close company of animals.
Writing of hermits, cowboys, changing seasons, and the wind, Ehrlich draws us into her personal relationship with this 'planet of Wyoming' she has come to call home. Ehrlich captures the beauty and harshness of natural forces in these remote reaches of the West, and the people who live there.
"Vivid, tough and funny. Wyoming has found its Whitman." —Annie Dillard
A fact-filled tour of the world's most wonderful winged creatures. Yuval Zommer's distinctive illustrations show off some of the most colorful, flamboyant, impressive, and wacky birds of the sky.
>>Other wonderful books by Zommer.
Will Albert ever get a quiet moment in which he can read his book?
In 1939, when he was eight years old, Auerbach was sent to England to escape the Nazi regime. His parents stayed behind and died in a concentration camp in 1943. Now in his eighties, Auerbach is still producing his distinctly sculptural paintings of friends, family and surroundings in north London, where he has made his home since the war. As well as being a friend of Lucian Freud, Francis Bacon and Leon Kossoff, Auerbach lends his story to one of the strands of W.G. Sebald's The Emigrants.
>>The forces of creation and destruction at work.
Billy Bragg argues that accountability is the antidote to authoritarianism, and that without it, we can never truly be free. He shows us that Freedom requires three dimensions to function: Liberty, Equality, and Accountability - and the result is a three dimensional space in which freedom can be exercised by all.
>> A long career of radical critique.
Fun facts! Incredible illustrations!
Quantum physics tells us that a particle can be in two places at once. Indeed, that particle is also a wave, and everything in the quantum world can be described entirely in terms of waves, or entirely in terms of particles, whichever you prefer. All of this was clear by the end of the 1920s. But to the great distress of many physicists, let alone ordinary mortals, nobody has ever been able to come up with a common sense explanation of what is going on. Physicists have sought 'quanta of solace' in a variety of more or less convincing interpretations. Gribbin introduces us to six.
In this attractive book, Babbs teaches us to identify and appreciate twenty trees commonly to be found on city streets, and leads our curiosity into their lore and uses.
"Full of gems; a manifesto for green cities. Babbs will turn us all into urban rangers, an unquiet army of neighbourhood watchers." —Max Adams
Across the globe 'politics as usual' are being rejected and faith in neoliberalism is fracturing beyond repair. Are we doomed or is there an opportunity to build a better system?
On June 28, 1969, the Stonewall Inn, a gay bar in New York's Greenwich Village, was raided by police. But instead of responding with the typical compliance the NYPD expected, patrons and a growing crowd decided to fight back. The five days of rioting that ensued changed forever the face of gay and lesbian life.
Includes Kevin Barry, Eimear McBride, Lisa McInerney, Stuart Neville, Sally Rooney, Kit de Waal, Belinda McKeon.
Examines the epochal and cultural phenomenon that is 1984 in all its aspects: its roots in the utopian and dystopian literature that preceded it; the personal experiences in wartime Britain that Orwell drew on as he struggled to finish his masterpiece in his dying days; and the political and cultural phenomena that the novel ignited at once upon publication and that far from subsiding, have only grown over the decades. The manifestations of its influence in contemporary popular culture and (gulp) politics are even wider than you may have suspected.
Air pollution has become the world's greatest environmental health risk, and science is only beginning to reveal its wide-ranging effects. Globally, 19,000 people die each day from air pollution, killing more than HIV/AIDS, tuberculosis, malaria and car accidents combined. But, as Smedley demonstrates, air pollution is a problem that can be solved.
Browne argues that the same spark that triggers each innovation can be used to counter its negative consequences, and that we must not put any brakes on technological advancement if we are to overcome the problems arising from technological advancement.
The first British women to set foot in India did so in the very early seventeenth century, two and a half centuries before the Raj. Women made their way to India for exactly the same reasons men did - to carve out a better life for themselves. In the early days, India was a place where the slates of 'blotted pedigrees' were wiped clean; bankrupts given a chance to make good; a taste for adventure satisfied - for women. They went and worked as milliners, bakers, dress-makers, actresses, portrait painters, maids, shop-keepers, governesses, teachers, boarding house proprietors, midwives, nurses, missionaries, doctors, geologists, plant-collectors, writers, travellers, and - most surprising of all — traders. As wives, courtesans and she-merchants, these tough adventuring women were every bit as intrepid as their men, the buccaneering sea captains and traders in whose wake they followed; their voyages to India were extraordinarily daring leaps into the unknown.
Against the backdrop of the First World War, Albert Einstein and Arthur Eddington developed and promulgated the theory that would reconfigure the universe.
The fairy tale retold to suit more socially aware times. Illustrations by Arthur Rackham.
A Finnish novel exploring random acts of chance and how ordinary people cope with extraordinary events. A young girl loses her mother when a block of ice falls from the sky. A woman wins the lottery jackpot twice in a row. A man is struck by lightning five times. Is there meaning to be found?
Democracy means rule by the people, but in practice even the most robust democracies delegate most rule making to a political class. The gap between the public and its public officials might seem unbridgeable in the modern world, but Legislature by Lot presents a close examination of an inspiring solution: a legislature chosen through 'sortition' — the random selection of lay citizens.
Daniel is a sixteen-year-old drug dealer and he's going to jail. Then, suddenly, he's not. A courtroom intervention. A long car ride to a big country house. Other 'gifted delinquents': the elusive, devastating Rachel, and Alex, so tightly wound he seems about to shatter. So where are they? It's not a school, despite the 'lessons' with the headsets and changing images. It's not a psych unit — not if the absence of medication means anything. It's not a jail, because Daniel's free to leave. Or that's what they tell him. He knows he and the others are part of an experiment. But he doesn't know who's running it or what they're trying to prove. And he has no idea what they're doing to him.
"The Subjects is energetic and compelling from the opening pages. And in Daniel we find a voice that I was worried was disappearing from Australian fiction: unpretentious, smart and lacking in all mawkishness. It’s a joy to hear him, and it is a joy to read a book of such complex ideas that is also alert to the art of storytelling." —Christos Tsiolkas
A compelling and original novel exploring the imaginative territory surrounding the life and works of Ryunosuke Akutagawa, one of Japan's outstanding modern writers (author of 'Rashōmon' and 'In a Bamboo Grove'), who was active during the turbulent Taishō period (1912-1926 (including the 1923 earthquake)), and who killed himself at the age of 35 in 1927. New edition.
"David Peace not only lays bare the psyche of an era in which Japan came of age as a modern nation, he gives us a stunning, intense, profound and moving portrait of the life and death of a great writer." —Japan Times
"David Peace writes the boldest and most original British fiction of his generation." —New York Times
>> David Mitchell talks with David Peace.
A Book About Whales teaches young readers everything they need to know about the largest mammals on earth: how they have evolved over millions of years, what and how they eat, their migration patterns, and more Andrea Antinori's whimsical black-and-white illustrations bring their underwater world to life.
The second wave of stories in this thoughtfully selected and beautifully designed series issued to mark Faber & Faber's 90th birthday has reached our shores. Come in and make your selection, or click here.
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