Showing results by publisher "Faber & Faber" in Literature & Fiction

In a hard-boiled city of crooks, grifts and rackets lurk a pair of toughs: Box and _____. They're the kind of men capable of extracting apologies and reparations, of teaching you a chilling lesson. They seldom think twice and ask very few questions. Until one night over the poker table, they encounter a pulp writer with wild ideas and an unscrupulous private detective, leading them into what is either a classic mystery, a senseless maze of corpses or an inextricable fever dream....

When Alex Cassidy and Diane Alison meet by chance at a party in Princeton, New Jersey, there are instant sparks. Both are single parents living in wealthy suburbia, independent, highly competent and seemingly settled in their lives. She runs a successful catering business. He's part of a crew that robs banks, casinos and jewellery stores around the world. Neither realises initially that their lives have overlapped before, or that their shared history and burgeoning relationship will come to threaten everything they love.

Catching a sudden look of defiance from his granddaughter inspires Hugo Williams to take up his pen and write this deeply moving new collection of poetry - the first since I Knew the Bride (2014), short-listed for the Forward and T. S. Eliot prizes. He navigates assuredly from thoughtful reminiscences of childhood and accounts of the war, through various climes and sensitively drawn relationships, to grim humour in the hospital ward and growing older with its attendant doubts and disappearances.

Jacques and His Master is a deliciously witty and entertaining 'variation' on Diderot's novel Jacques le Fataliste, written for Milan Kundera's 'private pleasure' in the aftermath of the Russian invasion of Czechoslovakia. When the 'heavy Russian irrationality' fell on Czechoslovakia he felt drawn to the spirit of the eighteenth century - 'and it seemed to me that nowhere was it to be found more densely concentrated than in that banquet of intelligence, humour and fantasy, Jacques le Fataliste'.

After Fame is a discursive rendering of the Roman epigrammatist Martial's Book I. Its 118 poems, on themes such as work, friendship and public life, are modelled after the source material through a variety of 'treatments' - most notably machine translation (for which Latin still presents near-insurmountable difficulties), employing the results as scaffolding for poems that quickly improvise their way clear of their originals.

Danny's family live in a large house close to the school where his father is headmaster. At school, his father's importance gives Danny certain privileges, but it also sets him apart from his classmates. When a new boy Philip, for whom everything seems easy, arrives, he surprises Danny by wanting to be friends. So when he and Philip are invited to work after school with inspiring, artistic teacher Mr. Miller, Danny believes he has found somewhere he can shine.

Kismet [n.] /'kismet/ Destiny; Fate. Origin: 19th century: from Arabic, qisma 'division, portion, lot', qasama 'to divide'. Anna [n.] /'æne/ Journalist and Community Shed entrepreneur, rent-a-sheep developer; in love. Or maybe not. Anna's a free spirit. Definitely happy. Or anxious. Or is it more panicked? She's certainly talented. Unless she's really a fraud. Absolutely hilarious - but possibly grieving. And lustful. On the edge. Having a glass of wine. Whether Kismet means destiny or division, Anna is about to test it to its very limits.

Welsey Cunningham grew up running barefoot through the orchards of his Quaker family farm, working with horses and dreaming of one day building himself a house on his own patch of ground above the river. The Second World War interrupted those dreams: it took Wes to New Guinea as a medic and then sent him home with healing bullet wounds in his legs. While Wes was away, life in Almond Tree continued but everyone's been changed by the war.

Matthew Francis' latest collection celebrates the richness of nature and of our responses to it. The pleasures of summer are emblazoned in the colourful wings and evocative names of butterflies, while a nocturnal encounter with an earwig becomes a joyous incantation to the 'witchy-beetle, forkin-robin' of dialect. His love of history, embodied in his acclaimed Mandeville and The Mabinogi, gives rise to a sequence based on Robert Hooke's microscopic observations.

Nidhi Zak/Aria Eipe's spellbinding debut poetry collection explores love and the wounds it makes. Its first half is composed of five sections, corresponding to the five arrows of Kama, the Hindu God of Love, Desire and Memory. Each arrow has its own effect on some body - a very real, contemporary body - and its particular journey of love. The second is a long narrative poem, 'A is for ????? [Arabs]', which follows a different kind of journey: a family of refugees who have fled to the West from conflict in an unspecified Middle Eastern country.

Reid was born in Hong Kong and, thanks to the roving nature of his father's employment, spent some of his childhood in foreign places. Most of the locations in this book, however, are the Britain of the 1950s and '60s - perhaps, at this distance in time, no less exotic. As the poems move from pre-verbal experience to adolescence, the younger self is captured in scenes that illuminate the steps by which a man - a poet - has been raised.

The Floodmeadow draws us into a seething pastoral where lightning threatens and thunder gathers, pylons and powerlines hum, and steel-framed gates sing out into the wind. In these incantatory pieces, everything is present at once. This is a visionary collection that invokes other times, dimensions and soundscapes to tell out some word of beauty and abundance in the here and now.