Showing results by publisher "Faber & Faber" in All Categories

The new novel from one of the most distinctive writers of the age, Parade sets loose a carousel of lives. It surges past the limits of identity, character, and plot, to tell a true story-about art, family, morality, gender, and how we compose ourselves.

After an uneventful Friday at the Dublin office, Cathal faces into the long weekend and takes the bus home. There, his mind agitates over a woman named Sabine with whom he could have spent his life, had he acted differently. All evening, with only the television and a bottle of champagne for company, thoughts of this woman and others intrude - and the true significance of this particular date is revealed.

We talk about memory as a record of the past, but here's a surprising twist: we aren't supposed to remember everything. In fact, we're designed to forget. Over the course of 25 years, Charan Ranganath has studied the seemingly selective and unreliable nature of human memory to find that our brains haven't evolved to keep a comprehensive record of events, but to extract the information needed to guide our future. Why We Remember unveils the principles behind what and why we forget and shines new light on the silent, pervasive influence of memory on how we learn, heal and make decisions.

Rising to the Surface traces Lenny Henry's career through the '80s and '90s. The 16-year-old who won a talent competition now has to navigate his way through the seas of professional comedy, learning his craft through sheer graft and hard work. We follow Lenny through a period of great creativity—prize-winning TV programmes, summer seasons across Britain, the starring role in a Hollywood film, stand-up gigs in New York and a gala wedding to Dawn French. But with each rise, there is a fall, the most traumatic being the death of his mother.

A young woman is in love with a successful surgeon, a man torn between his love for her and his incorrigible womanizing. His mistress, a free-spirited artist, lives her life as a series of betrayals - while her other lover, earnest, faithful, and good, stands to lose everything because of his noble qualities.

May 2021. London. Campbell Flynn - art historian and celebrity intellectual - is entering the empire of middle age. Fuelled by an appetite for admiration and the finer things, controversy and novelty, he doesn't take people half as seriously as they take themselves. Which will prove the first of his huge mistakes. The second? Milo Manghasa, his beguiling and provocative student. Milo inhabits a more precarious world, has experiences and ideas which excite his teacher. He also has a plan. Over the course of an incendiary year, a web of crimes and secrets and scandals will be revealed.

No other writer is more suited to chronicle the absurd and chaotic times we live in. This book—based on Hyde's spectacularly funny Guardian columns—tells the story of the hellscape of the Cameron, May and Johnson eras, Trumpian wtf-ery to celebrity twattery, the Royal soap-opera and the series finale of the United Kingdom. Hyde sees through the looking glass and calls out the utter crap rained down on us from populists, tech billionaires, reality TV monsters, media barons, sporting pundits and Gwyneth Paltrow.

Why do some women still expect men to buy their dinner? Why do some men feel depressed after masturbating? What the hell is going on with porn? Comedian Sara Pascoe explores the complex connections between sex, power and money. This audiobook is a thoughtful and entertaining journey through anatomy and arousal, dating and sex work, animals and technology, and Pascoe makes our most baffling human behaviours less mysterious.

Originally broadcast on BBC Radio 4, Jeremy Irons' perceptive reading illuminates the poetry of T. S. Eliot in all its complexity. Major poems range from 'The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock' through the post-war desolation of 'The Waste Land' and the spiritual struggle of 'Ash-Wednesday', to the enduring charm of 'Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats'.

Big Swiss. That's Greta's nickname for her - she is tall, and she is from Switzerland. Greta can see her now: dressed top to toe in white, that adorable gap between her two front teeth, her penetrating blue eyes. She's a head-turner: including the heads of infants and dogs. Well that's how Greta imagines seeing her; they haven't actually ever met in person. Nor has Greta actually ever been to Switzerland. Greta and Big Swiss are not in the same room, or even the same building.

It's the opportunity of a lifetime: Feyi is about to be given the chance to escape the City's blistering heat for a dream island holiday: poolside cocktails, beach sunsets, and elaborate meals. And as the sun goes down on her old life, our heroine also might just be ready to open her heart to someone new. The only problem is, she's falling for the one man she absolutely can't have.

Every Wednesday on The Zoe Ball Breakfast Show, BBC Radio 2's most inquisitive listeners get to put their questions to the QI Elves. The questions are wonderfully original, often silly and sometimes quirky, and the QI Elves' answers are always fascinating and frequently hilarious. From spiders to stinging nettles, bees to boy bands and twins to thermal undies, you'll wonder why these questions hadn't occurred to you before - but you'll never forget the answers and will want to share them will all your friends.

Ultra running defies conventional logic. Yet this most brutal and challenging sport is now one of the fastest growing in the world. But is it an antidote to modern life or a symptom of a modern illness? Adharanand Finn travelled to the heart of the sport to find out - and to see if could become an ultra runner himself. His journey took him from the deserts of Oman to the snow-capped peaks of the Rockies, and from a 24-hour track race in Tooting to his ultimate goal, the 105-mile Ultra-Trail du Mont-Blanc.

Written in his own unmistakable voice and with a new afterword by the author, this is the frank and fascinating memoir by arguably the greatest bass player of his generation. Beginning with an East End childhood in a London barely recovered from the War, he takes us on a journey through the beginnings of punk and post-punk as a founding member of Public Image Limited, an illustrious forty-year solo career which has seen collaborations musical greats such as U2, Brian Eno and CAN and a Mercury Music Prize nomination through to the present day still playing to sell out audiences.

1948, Japan. The celebrated painter Masuji Ono fills his days attending to his garden, his house repairs, his two grown daughters and his grandson; his evenings drinking with old associates in quiet lantern-lit bars. His should be a tranquil retirement. But as his memories continually return to the past - to a life and a career deeply touched by the rise of Japanese militarism - a dark shadow begins to grow over his serenity.

Suzi Ronson was working in a Beckenham hair salon in the early seventies when Mrs Jones came in for her weekly shampoo and set. After being introduced to her son David and his wife Angie, Suzi finds herself at the Bowies' bohemian apartment and is soon embroiled in their raucous world. Having crafted his iconic Ziggy Stardust hairstyle, Suzi becomes the only working woman in David's touring party and joins the Spiders from Mars as they perform around the globe.

Read by the critically acclaimed actress Maggie Gyllenhaal. When Esther Greenwood wins an internship at a New York fashion magazine in 1953, she is elated, believing she will finally realise her dream to become a writer. But in between the cocktail parties and piles of manuscripts, Esther's life begins to slide out of control. She finds herself spiralling into depression and eventually a suicide attempt as she grapples with difficult relationships and a society which refuses to take women's aspirations seriously.

A collection of Larkin's best-known poems, read by the poet. The Sunday Sessions consists of 26 poems, the contents of two tapes recorded by Philip Larkin in Hull in February 1980 - reportedly, each on a Sunday, after lunch with John Weeks, a sound engineer and colleague of the poet. The tapes contain work from Larkin's first major collection, The North Ship as well as poems from his best-known collections, The Whitsun Weddings and High Windows.

An Adam Dalgliesh mystery. Cover Her Face is P. D. James' debut novel, the first Adam Dalgliesh mystery, and a thrilling work of crime fiction set in the English countryside, from the best-selling author of Death Comes to Pemberley and Children of Men. From P. D. James, one of the masters of British crime fiction, comes the debut novel that introduced Scotland Yard detective Adam Dalgliesh.

Volume three of the definitive collection of Seamus Heaney reading his own work, recorded in in 2009 by RTE. Volume three contains four collections published between 1996 and 2010: The Spirit Level, Electric Light, District and Circle and Human Chain. To the RTE recordings Faber has added live readings by the poet of 11 poems from his 12th and final collection, Human Chain (2010).