Bücher veröffentlicht von Faber & Faber

The figure of the young American poet living in Paris is familiar from Paul Auster's celebrated novels; here that character is realised in Auster's own stunningly accomplished verse. His penetrating and charged poetry resembles little else in recent American literature. This collection of his poems, translations, and composition notes from early in his career furnish yet further evidence of his literary mastery. Taut, densely lyrical and everywhere informed by a powerful and subtle music, this selection begins with the compact verse fragments of Spokes (written when Auster was in his early twenties) and Unearth, continues on through the more ample meditations of Wall Writing, Disappearances, Effigies, Fragments From the Cold, Facing the Music, and White Spaces, then moves further back in time to include Auster's revealing translations of many of the French poets who influenced his own writing - including Paul Eluard, Andr, Breton, Tristan Tzara, Philippe Soupault, Robert Desnos and Ren, Char - as well as the provocative and previously unpublished 'Notes From A Composition Book' (1967). An introduction by Norman Finkelstein connects biographical elements to a consideration of the work, and takes in Auster's early literary and philosophical influences. For those interested in Paul Auster's novels - the now-classic New York Trilogy or The Brooklyn Follies - this book is an invaluable opportunity to witness his early development.Powerful, sometimes haunting, cool, precise and limpid, this view from the past to the present will appeal to those unfamiliar with this aspect of Auster's work, as well as those already acquainted with his poetry. Readers will agree that Auster's grasp on language and the world around him is not only questioning, but mysterious and very human, perceptive, and deeply compelling

1919 saw the publication of two major polemical works: The Economic Consequences of the Peace by John Maynard Keynes and Democratic Ideals and Reality by Halford J. Mackinder. The former is famous, the latter much less so - but it was its own way a prophetic book. Mackinder's message, his warning - addressed to the peacemakers at Versailles - was memorably summarized thus: 'Who Rules East Europe commands the Heartland: / Who rules the Heartland commands the World-Island: / Who rules the World-Island commands the World.' Mackinder contended that power was shifting from the sea-borne empires to countries that encompassed the great land masses: Eastern Europe he designated as 'the geographical pivot of history.' His thesis made a notable impression on German geopolitician Karl Haushofer who was keenly read, in turn, by Hitler. But Democratic Ideals and Reality has endured as a critical study of imperial ambitions and geographical realities.

'Griselda de Reptonville did not know what love was until she joined one of Mrs. Hatch's famous house parties at Beams, and there met Leander...'The Late Breakfasters (1964) was the sole novel Robert Aickman published in his lifetime. Its heroine Griselda is invited to a grand country house where a political gathering is to be addressed by the Prime Minister, followed by an All Party Dance. Expecting little, Griselda instead meets the love of her life. But their fledgling closeness is cruelly curtailed, and for Griselda life then becomes a quest to recapture the wholeness and happiness she felt all too briefly.'Those, if any, who wish to know more about me' - Aickman wrote in 1965 - 'should plunge beneath the frivolous surface of The Late Breakfasters.' Opening as a comedy of manners, its playful seriousness slowly fades into an elegiac variation on the great Greek myth of thwarted love.

After Robert Aickman's death in 1981 the manuscript of The Model, a wintry rococo fable set in Czarist Russia, was located among his papers. Aickman had told a friend he considered this novella to be 'one of the best things I have ever written, if not the very best.' It was duly published for the first time in 1987.The Model tells of Elena, a grave girl inclined to losing herself in dreams of becoming a student ballerina orcoryphee. Her dolour darkens further when she learns she is to be sold into marital slavery by her father so as to settle the family's debts. Refusing an unendurable future she sets out to the city of Smorevsk to pursue her dream. First, however, she must traverse a landscape crowded by highly curious characters and creatures.'A must for Aickman fans... A model of eloquent elegant enchantment.' Robert Bloch (Psycho)

'A masterpiece which delights from first page to last.' TLS'Very clever, very funny and very bold.' Victoria Glendinning, TimesBorn in 1894 to a well-off military family, Gerard Brenan was expected to follow the family tradition. But at Radley school he discovered a love of books and an urge to break the mould, which led him to abscond to Europe for six months. After the First World War he went to Spain, where he found the inspiration for his life's work (and began an affair with Dora Carrington.) Come the 1930s his life changed again, with marriage and the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War, which inspired his masterpiece The Spanish Labyrinth (1943).Drawing on long personal acquaintance as well as a wealth of unpublished correspondence, Jonathan Gathorne-Hardy looks unflinchingly at the whole of this remarkable man of letters - from his venturesome spirit to his troublesome sexuality to his literary accomplishment.'By no means unworthy to stand beside P N Furbank's Forster, Michael Holroyd's Strachey or Quentin Bell's Woolf... Affectionate but acerbic, learned but witty, elegant but relaxed, [Gathorne-Hardy] entertains as consistently as he informs.' Independent on Sunday

'Pictures of perfection make me sick and wicked,' Jane Austen wrote to her niece Fanny Knight a few months before she died. Yet most traditional accounts of Austen's life have insisted on portraying her as just such a picture of perfection. In his 1997 biography David Nokes re-examined Austen, and presented a far richer and livelier picture of the woman who once wrote in another of her letters, 'If I am a wild beast, I cannot help it...''A fine book, probably the best tribute to the genius of Jane.' Glasgow Herald'[This book] cries out to be read, not alone by fans of Jane Austen but by anyone who enjoys a great, witty, gossipy read.' Irish Times'What fun Nokes's book is,' Fay Weldon, Independent'David Nokes is assertive, energetic, opinionated, satirical, supremely confident, dramatising and gleefully splenetic.' Hermione Lee

A SUNDAY TIMES TOP 100 NOVEL OF THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURYA Sunday Times, Observer, Financial Times and Sunday Express Book of the YearWhen a man who calls himself a faith healer arrives in a small, west-coast Irish village, the community is soon under the spell of this charismatic stranger from the Balkans. One woman in particular, Fidelma McBride, becomes enthralled in a fatal attraction that leads to unimaginable consequences.The BBC Radio 4 dramatisation of Edna O'Brien's The Country Girls trilogy begins in August 2019.This ebook features the first chapter of Edna O'Brien's stunning new novel, Girl, published by Faber in September 2019 and available to pre-order now.

Young Phillip Maddison (1953) was the third entry in Henry Williamson's fifteen-volume A Chronicle of Ancient Sunlight spanning the years from the late Victorian period to the Second World War. It carries forward the story of Phillip as he grows towards manhood in the years immediately preceding the Great War. Unpredictable and wayward, Phillip nevertheless possesses a keen love of nature, which he indulges as best he can in the nearby countryside. But as his schooldays draw to a close he seems destined to follow his father by working in the Moon Fire Office, in the smoky heart of the greatest metropolis the world has ever seen.'Williamson's style is romantic, though rarely sentimental, and his sensuous response to nature is fresh and surprising.' Anthony Burgess, Ninety-Nine Novels: The Best in English since 1939

Marseilles, 1891: as Arthur Rimbaud lies dying in hospital, his mind wanders fitfully - taking him back to Commune-era Paris, and the scandalous life he led with Verlaine. But, above all, he is transported to Harar, Abyssinia, where he ventured in 1880 to seek his fortune, having chucking in the disreputable game of writing poetry...Paul Strathern's second novel, published in 1972, won a Somerset Maugham Award both for its superb evocation of the colour, squalor and hurlyburly of Harar and for its inspired 'impersonation' of Rimbaud - restless, ragged self-overcomer, would-be explorer-imperialist, and genius poet repulsed by his past literary life. In a new preface to this edition Strathern discusses the mercurial personality of Rimbaud, his novel's bold shifts between first and third person, and his own travels in East Africa that informed the book.

Joseph Hone's The Paris Trap, first published in 1977, saw him step aside from his sequence of 'Peter Marlow' novels to offer a different kind of political thriller.Jim Hackett and Harry Tyson first met in Paris, in days of hope - Hackett a promising actor, Tyson a budding writer. Twenty years later, their dreams soured, they are reunited in Paris for a substantive project: Hackett, now a movie actor, has been cast in a major film derived from a spy novel authored by Tyson, who now works for British intelligence. But the plot of the film, concerning a Palestinian terrorist cell, is about to be overtaken in the dramatic stakes by real events.'A fine example of a vastly popular genre - the thinking man's thriller.' Irish Times'Through a distorting filter of betrayals, private and public, Joseph Hone conducts us to a final scene so dire that Hamlet by comparison leaves the stage tidy.' Guardian

From the Orange Prize winning author of HomeAcclaimed on publication as a contemporary classic, Housekeeping is the story of Ruth and Lucille, orphansgrowing up in the small desolate town of Fingerbone in the vast northwest of America.Abandoned by a succession of relatives, the sisters find themselves in the care of Sylvie, the remote and enigmatic sister of their dead mother. Steeped in imagery of the bleak wintry landscape around them, the sisters' struggle towards adulthood is powerfully portrayed in a novel about loss, loneliness and transience.'I love and have lived with this book . . . it holds a unique and quiet place among the masterpieces of 20th century American fiction.' Paul Bailey'I found myself reading slowly, than more slowly--this is not a novel to be hurried through, for every sentence is a delight.' Doris Lessing

'He gives us more than himself or 'a world'; he gives us a sense of infinity embodied in the language.' Alongside Joseph Brodsky's words of praise one might mention the more concrete honours that the renowned poet Derek Walcott has received: a MacArthur Fellowship; the Queen's Gold Medal for Poetry; the Nobel Prize in Literature. The Poetry of Derek Walcott 1948-2013 draws from every stage of the poet's storied career. Here are examples of his very earliest work, like 'In My Eighteenth Year,' published when the poet himself was still a teenager; his first widely celebrated verse, like 'A Far Cry from Africa,' which speaks of violence, of loyalties divided in one's very blood; his mature work, like 'The Schooner Flight' from The Star-Apple Kingdom; and his late masterpieces, like the tender 'Sixty Years After,' from the 2010 collection White Egrets. Across sixty-five years, Walcott has grappled with the themes that have defined his work as they have defined his life: the unsolvable riddle of identity; the painful legacy of colonialism on his native Caribbean island of St. Lucia; the mysteries of faith and love and the natural world; the Western canon, celebrated and problematic; the trauma of growing old, of losing friends, family, one's own memory. This collection, selected by Walcott's friend the English poet Glyn Maxwell, will prove as enduring as the questions, the passions, that have driven Walcott to write for more than half a century.

This third edition of Alan Brownjohn's Collected Poems was first published by the Enitharmon Press in 2006. It adds over 140 poems to the second, which appeared in 1988. This volume comprises all of the work that Brownjohn wishes to retain from his twelve individual collections published between 1954 and 2004; it also incorporates a number of newer uncollected poems.Wide-ranging in theme and displaying an impressive mastery of form, this body of writing firmly establishes Alan Brownjohn's achievement as central to the English poetry of the last half-century.'Wonderfully rich and well-produced... Brownjohn is a marvellously skilful comedian... he is a social poet in the sense that if people in the future want to know what many lives were like in the second half of the 20th century, they should read Alan Brownjohn - observant, troubled, humane, scrupulous, wry, funny.' Anthony Thwaite, Guardian

The Trouble-Makers (1963) was Celia Fremlin's fourth novel and - as Chris Simmons contends in his new preface to this Faber Finds edition - has a case to be considered among her very best.Katharine is a suburban housewife, desultorily unemployed, unhappily married, struggling to keep up appearances but consoled to some degree by the even more aggravated woes of her next-door neighbour Mary - until, that is, Katharine is brought to the disturbing realisation that Mary's predicament is in fact substantially worse. 'A cleverly devised story. A chorus of nicely-characterised suburban wives speculate on Mary's troubles. Fremlin builds up the whole thing into a crescendo of horror.' Sunday Times'One again Fremlin shows how incomparably more chilling is her quiet, semifactual style than some of the hysterical sentimentalities from Over the Water.' Guardian

Seven Lean Years (1961) was Celia Fremlin's third novel of suspense. Its protagonist is Ellen Fortescue, engaged to be married, but oddly uneasy about her approaching wedding. Her fiance Leonard is a man of varying moods, most combustibly where the subject of his stepmother Laura is concerned. Ellen is inclined to a kinder view; but then the woman Ellen calls 'Cousin Laura' does have a complicated history with the Fortescue family...'Fremlin wraps up her little mystery cunningly in this accomplished thriller-chiller of a book.' Sunday Times'Fremlin has a quite extraordinary ability for imbuing the normal with intimations of doom-to-come. And when she begins to develop her elegantly horrible climax, the shivers chase each other down one's spine.'Birmingham Post'Celia Fremlin is about our best hope to compete with the American intelligent superior suspense school.'Observer

Celia Fremlin's sixth novel Prisoner's Base (1967) served further proof of her mastery at uncovering anxieties and even terrors in the domestic sphere. It tells of grandmother Margaret, her daughter Claudia, and Claudia's daughter Helen, who share a home from which Claudia's husband is frequently absent. Claudia has a penchant for taking strangers under her wing and into the house, the danger being that they never leave. But a different danger is proposed by Maurice, a self-styled poet who boasts that he has served seven years in prison for manslaughter.'Haunting...Fremlin continues to prove that the modern horror story makes the traditional Gothic one no more than a child's make-believe.' Los Angeles Times'Gripping... a tense thriller that keeps one in suspense until the very last line.' Manchester Evening News

The Jealous One (1964), Celia Fremlin's fifth novel, opens on its protagonist Rosamund as she wakes from a mid-morning nap to find, to her delight, that she is running a temperature. Surely that explains her blinding headache, and even the weird, delirious dream in which she had murdered her overly seductive neighbour, Lindy? A great relief, then, to find this was merely the work of a fevered imagination. Until her husband exclaims, 'Rosamund! Have you any idea what's happened to Lindy? She's disappeared!...''A tense situation, ultimately resolved by a beautifully fitting plot-twist. Even more memorable than the suspense story is the witty and acute comedy.' New York Times'A brilliant example of the psychological thriller. The little worm of jealousy devours its way into the mind, gradually, page by page.' Hampstead & Highgate Express

Don't Go to Sleep in the Dark (1972) was the first gathering of Celia Fremlin's short fiction, a form in which she had published prolifically - for the likes of She, Playmen, and Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine - while building her reputation as a novelist of psychological suspense.Female characters predominate in these tales, as does the doom-filled atmosphere that was Fremlin's metier. She explores her familiar theme of strained mother-child relations, but she also delves into the supernatural realm as well as the psychological. As ever, her capacities for making the everyday unnerving and keeping the reader guessing are richly in evidence.'Here are thirteen harrowing tales by the indisputable mistress of horror.' Chattanooga Times'An outstanding collection...all are well-written and all are possible and none should be read when alone in a dark house.' Savannah Morning News

In The Missionary's Wife (1996) - his return to historical fiction - Tim Jeal expertly evoked Africa in the 1890s: a continent in turmoil as a horde of prospecters, hunters and missionaries scramble after gold, ivory, and converts. Young Englishwoman Clara Musson, though, travels with a different purpose. Jilted in love, doubting her Christian faith, she hoped to find renewed meaning as the wife of charismatic missionary Robert Haslam. What she finds is an obsessive zeal that will provoke a civil war.'A powerful love story fleshed out with vivid historical detail, narrative tension and subtle post-colonial awareness... remarkably engaging and skilfully told.' Guardian'Jeal brilliantly evokes the sights and sounds and smells of 1890s Africa.' Sunday Times'Brilliantly plotted... a book of deep moral intelligence.' Lynn Barber, Literary Review'Gripping... moving and convincing.' Allan Massie, Scotsman

Originally published in 1985, four years after its author's untimely death, Love and Freedom is the unforgettable story of Rosemary Kavan, an Englishwoman whose marriage to a Czech led her to experience life in post-war Prague, from early optimistic years, through the nightmare of the Stalinist purges, up to the 'Prague Spring' and its aftermath. Her husband Pavel, a devoted communist, fell victim to the show-trials of the early 1950s and spent years in prison, dying soon after his release. Branded 'a traitor's wife', Rosemary struggled to support herself and her two sons. In the mid-1960s she became involved in the student reform movement, but the Russian invasion of 1968 came as a further cataclysm.'An outstanding memoir.' George Steiner'The story of a tragic disillusionment, political and personal, told with invincible humour.' Graham Greene'The overwhelming impression left by this book is one of warmth, true comradeship, courage and hope.' Timothy Garton Ash

Donkey Boy (1952) was the second entry in Henry Williamson's fifteen-volume A Chronicle of Ancient Sunlightspanning the years from the late Victorian period to the Second World War. It tells of Richard Maddison's first-born Phillip, nicknamed 'donkey boy' because his life was saved in infancy by being fed with ass's milk. The boy grows up in the Edwardian era, something of a misfit, at odds with his father. 'With extraordinary skill and precision [Williamson] rebuilds the scenery of the past... [he] seems to be engaged in a thriller whose instalments can be relied on to animate a whole section of social history.' Spectator'Williamson's style is romantic, though rarely sentimental, and his sensuous response to nature is fresh and surprising.' Anthony Burgess, Ninety-Nine Novels: The Best in English since 1939

'Entertaining and rich in comedy . . . gripping and moving.' William TrevorSister Judith Clancy is told that she must leave the protection of her convent and return to her family. So begins the unravelling of community ties which form this brilliant and devastating story of human and political relations in twentieth-century Ireland. Past and present, memory, madness and buried trauma shift in a disturbing kaleidoscope as four generations of the O'Malleys and Clanceys attempt to come to terms with the after-effects of the Irish Civil War.No Country for Young Men was nominated for the Booker Prize.'One of the very best books of its kind that it has ever been my pain and pleasure to read.' Guardian'A book to be bought and read and thought about.' Irish Times

'The only remarkable thing people can tell of their doings these days is that they have stayed at home', declared George Eliot in 1869. In Victorian and Edwardian Britain travel became the rage. The middle classes and the aristocracy seemed in a constant flux of arrival and departure, their luggage festooned with foreign labels. The revolution in transport made this possible. The Mediterranean Passion describes how the British travelled to the South and where they went. Drawing on what these travellers wrote, and what was written for them, it enriches our understanding of the Victorians and Edwardians by exploring the medical, religious, sexual and aesthetic dimensions of their journeys and illuminates an important but neglected aspect of British social and cultural history.'... combines scholarship with charm ... It could easily be taken to the Mediterranean on a holiday and read with pleasure on a sunny beach or in the shade of a church.' Asa Briggs, Financial Times 'I was impressed not merely by the range of his erudition - historical, cultural, literary, topographical, medical et al. - and by the depth of his enquiries into his subject but by the subtlety and refinement of his prose. He deals with very elusive, complex and culturally contradictory matters, upon which few, if any, could arrive at persuasive generalisations; yet he does so throughout the book, while his conclusion is a marvel of judgment, excelling even what his preceded.' David Selbourne (author of The Principle of Duty) The Mediterranean Passion was the joint winner of the 1987 Wolfson Literary Award for History.

In this, the sequel to Slow Boats to China (also reissued in Faber Finds), Gavin Young tells, with equal panache, of his return voyage from the China Seas to England, via the South Seas, Cape Horn and West Africa.'I am decidedly envious of Gavin Young and his Slow Boats Home, successor to his highly entertaining Slow Boats to China . . . a fascinating, memorable book.' Eric Newby, Guardian 'Like Slow Boats to China this is likely to become a classic of travel.' Francis King, Spectator

How Dear is Life (1954) was the fourth entry in Henry Williamson's fifteen-volume A Chronicle of Ancient Sunlight spanning the years from the late Victorian period to the Second World War. It finds Phillip Maddison in the portentous months leading to the outbreak of war in 1914.Now a clerk in the Moon Fire Office, Phillip decides to join the territorials - attracted by the money, the camp near the sea, and the prospect of a new suit of clothes. As a glorious summer slips away war seems unreal; but the old world is in peril, and before long the British Expeditionary Force is setting sail for France.'Williamson's style is romantic, though rarely sentimental, and his sensuous response to nature is fresh and surprising.' Anthony Burgess, Ninety-Nine Novels: The Best in English since 1939

"e;This is an unpretentious book, but it brings out with unusual clearness the dilemma that faces every official in an empire like our own."e; George OrwellTrials in Burma recounts Maurice Collis' experiences as a district magistrate in Rangoon in the late 1920s. The book recounts his gradual realisation that far from administering an impartial system of justice, he is expected to protect British interests. In a cool dispassionate style, Collis describes how, by choosing integrity over career, he eventually loses his job."e;A brilliant, direct and extraordinarily vivid account of this troubled period...a masterly survey of the Burmese scene."e; Daily Mail

Set in a near future (the novel was first published in 1961 and is set in the period 1970-73), this is Angus Wilson's most allegorical novel, about a doomed attempt to set up a reserve for wild animals. Simon Carter, secretary of the London Zoo, has accepted responsibility and power to the prejudice of his gifts as a naturalist. But power is more than just the complicated game played by the old men at the zoo in the satirical first half of this novel: it lies very near to violence, and in the second half real life inexorably turns to fantasy - the fantasy of war.This tense and at times brutal story offers the healing relationship between man and the natural world as a solution for the power dilemma.

The Dark Lantern (1951) was the first of Henry Williamson's fifteen-volume A Chronicle of Ancient Sunlightspanning the years from the late Victorian period to the Second World War. In it we meet Richard Maddison, a countryman working in London as a City clerk, struggling to make do on a few shillings a week. He falls for Hetty Turner, youngest daughter of a prosperous merchant, but her father rates Richard an unsuitable suitor.'There is magic in Henry Williamson's novel . . . which raises it right out of the family saga class. The magic is of the steam train age of South London which is so lovingly described.' John Betjeman, Daily Telegraph 'Williamson's style is romantic, though rarely sentimental, and his sensuous response to nature is fresh and surprising.' Anthony Burgess, Ninety-Nine Novels: The Best in English since 1939

Killed at Arras in 1917, Edward Thomas left behind him a short, vivid history of his own early life, covering the period from his birth to his entry into St Paul's. Though a fragment, in many senses it is far more: in the words of its author 'no less than an autobiography . . . an attempt to put down on paper what [this author] sees when he thinks of himself from 1878 to about 1895'. The Childhood of Edward Thomas was not published until 1938, over two decades after Thomas originally showed the manuscript to a publisher. Those eventual publishers, Faber & Faber, were building on their release two years earlier of Thomas's Collected Poems, for which he was becoming best known.This edition includes Edward Thomas's 'War Diary,' a record of the last three months of his life when, as an elderly - at thirty-eight - subaltern he fought among the misery of the trenches. To witness Thomas's childhood memoir and wartime diaries in such close proximity is to have a moving incarnation of his distinctive voice, its clarity and - even in war - its unfailing attention to his fellow-creatures.

'Beautiful, lyrical, sensitive and meaningful . . . It deserves to be read and re-read.' Los Angeles Times Two deadly enemies - a young Arab rebel and a Jewish runaway - meet in a remote valley to begin a quest. Both have been taught since infancy to hate; to attack for self-defence. But something incredible is happening to them, something that not even the fierce shelling of the Six-Day War can intrude upon. For they are on a fantastic mission, a mission both believe has been set for them by God . . . Gripping, exciting and incredibly poignant, Smith's Gazelle is an intriguing thriller from a master of the genre.