FaberBooks: Recent Episodes
FaberBooks
Faber and Faber is one of the great independent publishing houses in London. We were established in 1929 by Geoffrey Faber and our first editor was T. S. Eliot. We are proud to publish prize-winning fiction and non-fiction, as well as an unrivalled list of modern poets and playwrights. Among our list of writers we have five Booker Prize winners and twelve Nobel Laureates, and we continue to seek out the most exciting and innovative writers at work today.
In this event, Doireann Ní Ghríofa and Helen Victoria Murray use Said the Dead as the basis for their discussion about how tactility and the symbolism of the hand can bring us closer to history, both as historians and creative practitioners. Their conversation touches on themes of archive work and literature as forms of mediumship; bodies, gender and memory in Doireann’s work; and on hands as agents of care, discipline and control in Said the Dead and the work of the Victorian Hand Project. The recording begins with audio from a short film shot with Doireann in Cork by Peter Madden.SAID THE DEADIn the city of Cork, a derelict Victorian mental hospital is being converted into modern apartments. One passerby has always flinched as she passes the place. Had her birth occurred in another decade, she too might have lived within those walls. Now, she notices a sign: FOR SALE. It is the first of many signs. Following them, she finds herself drawn into an irresistible river of forgotten voices, those of the women who knew this place best: insistent, vivid and true. They murmur from archives and old records; they whisper from stairwells and walls. Among them – and in one figure in particular – she may find meaning, solace, rage; her own salvation, perhaps, or her own vanishing?A work of sublime intensity and tenderness, Said the Dead breaks the boundaries between worlds – past and present, imagined and real – to make something lasting and new: an experience full of danger, full of love and full of truth.THE VICTORIAN HAND PROJECTThe Victorian Hand Project grapples with the complex legacies of the Victorian past through historical, imaginative, and creative interventions. Based at the University of the Arts, London and Lancaster University, the project explores the significance of the hand, including tactility, gesture, the medical/surgical aspects of the hand and the craft and care work done by hands. The project, in collaboration with its partners The Hunterian Museum at The Royal College of Surgeons of England and The Quilters’ Guild of the British Isles, is working with artist Ruth Singer and filmmaker Lily Ford to create textile art, a series of films inspired by their research, and a series of interactive public workshops.Helen Victoria Murray is interdisciplinary. Helen writes across fiction, poetry and criticism. She is interested in weird houses, obsolete formats and bodies with intangible boundaries. Helen is Research Associate in Victorian Cultural and Material History at Lancaster University. Her creative work unites with her academic research through core themes of temporality, materiality and embodiment.Joanne Begiato is Professor of History and Material Culture Studies, London College of Fashion, University of the Arts London. She has published widely on the history of emotions, bodies, material culture, masculinities, family, parenting, and marriage from the seventeenth to nineteenth centuries.Michael Brown is Lecturer in Modern British History at Lancaster University. He has published extensively on the history of medicine, surgery, asylums, emotions, bodies and war in the long nineteenth century.Ross Cameron is a Public Engagement Fellow at London College of Fashion, University of the Arts London. He has published extensively on travel writing and the social, cultural and political connections between Britain and Southeastern Europe in the nineteenth century. He is currently researching the sense of touch in travel literature.
This reading of Hope Mirrlees’s Paris is from a Dead Poets Live production with Charlotte Rampling and Lambert Wilson, recorded in Paris in 2019 and directed by James Lever.© the Estate of Hope Mirrlees
Camille Ralphs reads My Word: from the Spiritual Diary of Dr Dee, a sequence of poems from her debut collection, After You Were, I Am (Faber & Faber, 2024), which is now available in audiobook, paperback and ebook.'An astonishing adventure . . .This is poetry that delights in etymology and alchemical wordplay.' Guardian'After You Were, I Am, showcases an ambition, seriousness and wit that make it strangely timeless – one feels it could have been published in any era and be worthy of a readership . . . I expect to be re-reading it for years to come.' Telegraph
Listen to an extract from the Booker Prize winning Rites of Passage originally read by William Golding in 1989 and re-mastered in 2022.
Thomas Stearns Eliot, poet, critic, publisher, was born in St Louis, Missouri, in 1888 and died in London on 4 January 1965. In 1922, he published The Waste Land, a poem that exerted the single greatest influence on English poetry in the last century, and whose centenary will be marked by publication and events throughout the coming year.
Listen to Edoardo Ballerini read the opening lines from The Waste Land, taken from the audio book of the Centenary Edition available from 6 January 2022.
Listen to the essay 'Black British Mothers Matter', written by Baroness Doreen Lawrence and read by Debra Michaels. Introduced by Marcus Ryder.
This is an exclusive extract from the audiobook Black British Lives Matter, a wide-ranging and urgent essay collection highlighting the vital benefits that Black Britons bring to society and the crucial importance of eradicating systemic racism. Edited by Lenny Henry and Marcus Ryder and featuring contributions from Doreen Lawrence, David Olusoga, Dawn Butler, Anne-Marie Imafidon and many others. Find out more about the book: faber.co.uk/product/9780571368495-black-british-lives-matter/
Listen to 'Black British Historians Matter' by Lenny Henry and David Olusoga, read by Lenny Henry and Ben Onwukwe.
This is an exclusive extract from the audiobook Black British Lives Matter, a wide-ranging and urgent essay collection highlighting the vital benefits that Black Britons bring to society and the crucial importance of eradicating systemic racism. Edited by Lenny Henry and Marcus Ryder and featuring contributions from Doreen Lawrence, David Olusoga, Dawn Butler, Anne-Marie Imafidon and many others. Find out more: faber.co.uk/product/9780571368495-black-british-lives-matter/
Experience a shipwrecked sailor's psychic disintegration into 'a naked madman on a rock' by the radical Nobel Laureate and author of Lord of the Flies.
An hour on this rock is a lifetime.
Christopher Martin, the sole survivor of a torpedoed destroyer, is stranded upon a rock in the middle of the Atlantic. Pitted against him are the sea, the sun, the brutal cold, and the aching terror of his isolation. To drink there is a pool of rainwater; to eat, seaweed and anemones, preyed upon by feathered reptiles. As he descends into the abyss of his consciousness, weathering lightning strikes of memory, Martin must try to assemble the truth of his fate - piece by terrible piece.
'A work of genius.' Philippa Gregory
'The utmost inventiveness ... No reader will forget the world it reveals.' Kingsley Amis
'Wizardry of the first order.' Observer
Hunt, trek, and feast among Neanderthals in this stunning vision of prehistory on the cusp of a new age, from the radical Nobel Laureate and author of Lord of the Flies.
This was a different voice; not the voice of the people. It was the voice of other.
When spring comes, the people leave their winter cave, foraging for honey and shoots, bulbs and grubs, the hot richness of a deer's brain. They awaken the fire to heat their naked bodies, lay down their thorn bushes, and share pictures in their minds.
But strange things are happening - inexplicable scents, sounds, and violence - and, suddenly, unimaginable creatures are half-glimpsed in the forest; an upright new people of bone-faces and deerskins. What the early people don't know is that their season is already over ...
'An earthquake in the petrified forests of the English novel.' Arthur Koestler
'A tour de force ... Genius.' Daily Telegraph
'Alarming, eye-opening, desolating, mind-invading and unique.' New Statesman
'Powerful and provocative ... Each time I revisit The Inheritors I find something new.' Penelope Lively
An extract from the audiobook of Sylvia Plath's The Bell Jar, read by Maggie Gyllenhaal.
‘A modern classic.’ Guardian
‘A near-perfect work of art.’ Joyce Carol Oates
I was supposed to be having the time of my life . . .
Working as an intern for a New York fashion magazine in the summer of 1953, Esther Greenwood is on the brink of her future. Yet she is also on the edge of a darkness that makes her world increasingly unreal. Esther’s vision of the world shimmers and shifts: day-to-day living in the sultry city, her crazed men-friends, the hot dinner dances . . .
The Bell Jar, Sylvia Plath’s only novel, is partially based on Plath’s own life. It has been celebrated for its darkly funny and razor sharp portrait of 1950s society, and has sold millions of copies worldwide.
ONE OF THE BBC'S '100 NOVELS THAT SHAPED OUR WORLD'
'As clear and readable as it is witty and disturbing.' New York Times Book Review
Reader responses:
'Plath's underrated humour shines through this startling account of 1950s 'normality'.'
'Very readable, often darkly funny, and feels fresh.'
'Plath's masterpiece . . . It's amazing how relevant this book still is.'
'So enthralling . . . So thought provoking, so vivid, that it's thoroughly engrossing.'
'I just couldn't put it down.'
'Ever better than I expected.'
'An immensely engaging writer: wry and witty, and insightful.' Sunday Times
'A vivid and meticulous writer.' Observer
From the widely renowned author Andrew O'Hagan, a heartbreaking novel of an extraordinary lifelong friendship.
Everyone has a Tully Dawson: the friend who defines your life.
In the summer of 1986, in a small Scottish town, James and Tully ignite a brilliant friendship based on music, films and the rebel spirit. With school over and the locked world of their fathers before them, they rush towards the climax of their youth: a magical weekend in Manchester, the epicentre of everything that inspires them in working-class Britain. There, against the greatest soundtrack ever recorded, a vow is made: to go at life differently. Thirty years on, half a life away, the phone rings. Tully has news.
Mayflies is a memorial to youth’s euphorias and to everyday tragedy. A tender goodbye to an old union, it discovers the joy and the costs of love
A magisterial and profoundly perceptive survey of Britain’s post-war role on the global stage, from Suez to Brexit.
In 1962 the American statesman Dean Acheson famously charged that Britain had lost an empire and failed to find a new role. Nearly sixty years later the rebuke rings true again. Britain’s postwar search for its place in the world has vexed prime ministers and government since the nation's great victory in 1945: the cost of winning the war was giving up the empire.
After the humiliation of Anthony Eden’s Suez expedition, Britain seemed for a time to have found an answer. Clinging to its self-image as a great island nation, it would serve as America’s best friend while acknowledging its geography by signing up to membership of the European Union. Never a comfortable balancing act, for forty years it appeared to work. In 2016 David Cameron called the Brexit referendum and blew it up.
Award-winning journalist Philip Stephens paints a fascinating portrait of a nation struggling to reconcile its waning power with past glory. Drawing on decades of personal contact and interviews with senior politicians and diplomats in Britain, the United States and across the capitals of Europe, Britain Alone is a vivid account of a proud nation struggling to admit it is no longer a great power. It is an indispensable guide to how we arrived at the state we are in.
A definitive insight into the ever-influential world of Mark E. Smith and the Fall, bringing together previously unseen artwork, rare ephemera and handwritten material, alongside essays by a slate of fans.
To 50,000 Fall Fans: please buy this inspired & inspiring, profound & provocative, beautiful & bonkers Book of Revelations, choc-stock-full of loving Acts by true Apostles, simultaneously both the scrapbook you wished you'd kept and a portal to futures & pasts, known & unknown, & a Fantastic Celebration of this Nation's Saving Grace.' DAVID PEACE
'Mind blowing... brilliant.' TIM BURGESS
’A container sized treasure trove bursting at the hinges with strangeness and wonder ... I strongly advise you to buy it.’ MAXINE PEAKE
This is not a book about a rock band. This is not even a book about Mark E Smith. This is a book about The Fall group – or more precisely, their world.
Over a prolific forty-year career, the Fall created a world that was influential, idiosyncratic and fiercely original; it was an education. Who wouldn’t want to be armed with a working knowledge of M.R. James, contemporary dance and Manchester City?
Bringing together previously unseen artwork, rare ephemera and handwritten material, alongside essays by a slate of fans, EXCAVATE! is a vivid, definitive record – an illumination of the dark corners of the Fall’s wonderful and frightening world.
Set in Rhodesia in the 1960s, almost twenty years before Zimbabwe won independence and ended white minority rule, the novel’s heroine, Tambudzai Sigauke, embarks on her education. On her shoulders rest the economic hopes of her parents, siblings, and extended family, and within her burns the desire for “personhood,” to no longer be part of such an “undistinguished humanity.”
Immediately acclaimed by Alice Walker and Doris Lessing, the book has come to be considered one of Africa’s most important novels of the twentieth century.' Madeleine Thien
The first in Rachel Cusk's critically-acclaimed trilogy, shortlisted for the Folio Prize and the Goldsmith Prize and longlisted for the IMPAC Prize. Read by Kristin Scott Thomas.
Outline is a novel in ten conversations. Spare and lucid, it follows a novelist teaching a course in creative writing over an oppressively hot summer in Athens. She leads her student in storytelling exercises. She meets other writers for dinner. She goes swimming in the Ionian Sea with her seatmate from the place. The people she encounters speak volubly about themselves, their fantasies, anxieties, pet theories, regrets, and longings. And through these disclosures, a portrait of the narrator is drawn by contrast, a portrait of a woman learning to face great a great loss.
Outline is the first book in a short and yet epic cycle – a masterful trilogy which will be remembered as one of the most significant achievements of our times.
'Outline succeeds powerfully. Among other things, it gets a great variety of human beings down on the page with both immediacy and depth; an elemental pleasure that makes the book as gripping to read as a thriller... A stellar accomplishment.' James Lasdun, Guardian
'The most vivid evocation of Bessie Smith I have ever read' - Ian Carr, BBC Music
'[Bessie Smith] showed me the air and taught me how to fill it ... she's the reason I started singing, really' - Janis Joplin
Bessie Smith: singer, icon, pioneer.
Bessie Smith was born in Tennessee in 1894. Orphaned by the age of nine, she sang on street corners before becoming a big name in travelling shows. In 1923 she made her first recording for a new start-up called Columbia Records. It sold 780,000 copies, making her a star. Smith’s life was notoriously difficult: she drank pints of ‘bathtub gin’, got into violent fist fights, spent huge sums of money and had passionate love affairs with men and women. She once single-handedly fought off a chapter of the Ku Klux Klan.
As a young black girl growing up in Glasgow, Jackie Kay found in Bessie someone with whom she could identify and who she could idolise. In this remarkable book Kay mixes biography, fiction, poetry and prose to create an enthralling account of an extraordinary life.
Klara and the Sun is the first novel by Kazuo Ishiguro since he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature 2017.
AVAILABLE TO PREORDER NOW
From the bestselling and Booker Prize winning author of Never Let me Go and The Remains of the Day, a stunning new novel - his first since winning the Nobel Prize in Literature - that asks, what does it mean to love? A thrilling feat of world-building, a novel of exquisite tenderness and impeccable restraint, Klara and the Sun is a magnificent achievement, and an international literary event.
SHORTLISTED FOR THE T. S. ELIOT PRIZE SHORTLISTED FOR THE COSTA POETRY AWARD SHORTLISTED FOR THE FORWARD PRIZE FOR BEST FIRST COLLECTION SHORTLISTED FOR THE POLARI FIRST BOOK PRIZE
In this intimate and vital debut, Richard Scott creates an uncompromising portrait of love and gay shame. Examining how trauma becomes a part of the language we use, Scott takes us back to our roots: childhood incidents, the violence our scars betray, forgotten forebears and histories. The hungers of sexual encounters are underscored by the risks that threaten when we give ourselves to or accept another. But the poems celebrate joy and tenderness, too, as in a sequence re-imagining the love poetry of Verlaine.
The collection crescendos to Scott's tour de force, 'Oh My Soho!', where a night stroll under the street lamps of Soho Square becomes a search for true lineage, a reclamation of stolen ancestors, hope for healing, and, above all, the finding of our truest selves. Attachments area
DECEMBER 1938 Storm clouds hover once again over Europe
Josephine Tey and Archie Penrose gather with friends for a Cornish Christmas, but two strange and brutal deaths on St Michael’s Mount – and the unexpected arrival of a world-famous film star, in need of sanctuary – interrupt the festivities. Cut off by the sea and a relentless blizzard, the hunt for a murderer begins.
Pivoting on a real moment in history, the ninth novel in the Josephine Tey series draws on all the much-loved conventions of the Golden Age Christmas mystery, whilst giving them a thrilling contemporary twist.
Buy Now: https://uk.bookshop.org/books/the-dead-of-winter-9780571353248/9780571353248
Journalist of the Year 2019 Amelia Gentleman talks about The Windrush Betrayal: Exposing the Hostile Environment, her acclaimed book on the Windrush scandal longlisted for the Baillie Gifford Prize for Non-Fiction and the Orwell Prize.
‘It is impossible to overstate the importance of this heartbreaking book.’ James O’Brien
‘Devastating . . . One of the most shameful episodes of our history is revealed.’ Claire Tomalin, New Statesman Books of the Year
How do you pack for a one-way journey back to a country you left when you were eleven and have not visited for fifty years?
Amelia Gentleman’s exposé of the Windrush scandal – where thousands of British citizens were wrongly classified as illegal immigrants with life-shattering consequences – shocked the nation and led to the resignation of Amber Rudd as Home Secretary. Here, Gentleman tells the full story for the first time.
‘It’s shocking to read about people who had given so much care to this country – nurses, NHS drivers, special needs teaching assistants – being treated so coldly… Reads like a Black Mirror-style dystopia.’ Sukhdev Sandhu, Observer Book of the Week
‘Reveals how one of the most shocking scandals of recent years came about while always giving voice to the people who matter most, the victims.’ Professor David Olusoga
‘Proves why independent journalism is so vital.’ Reni Eddo-Lodge
Buy the book: Guardian Bookshop: https://guardianbookshop.com/the-windrush-betrayal-9781783351855.html Waterstones: https://www.waterstones.com/book/the-windrush-betrayal/amelia-gentleman/9781783351855 Amazon: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Windrush-Betrayal-Exposing-Hostile-Environment/dp/1783351853/ Audible:https://www.amazon.co.uk/Windrush-Betrayal-Exposing-Hostile-Environment/dp/B07XVPXMD1/
Welcome to After Fame – an ambitious and resonant engagement with the epigrams of the Roman poet Martial, which completes the loose trilogy of Sam Riviere’s process-derived works.
It was Martial who first used the term ‘plagiarism’ in its modern sense as a kind of literary theft. Here, the notion is tested even further through the figure of a distracted scribe who, by means of various methods of transcription, including the use of machine translation and creative embellishment, presents a copy of Martial’s famous Book I unlike any other. These 118 poems cover timeless themes such as work, friendship, public life and sexual mores, and, as they unfold, are increasingly interrupted by reflections on authorship, technology, cultural complicity and the privileged, mediating role of the poet: all fixations of Martial’s work that still resonate today.
Not strict translation, bona fide reproduction nor wholly original writing, After Fame challenges the integrity of such categories. So liberated, it dramatises the obscurity of its source, refraining from easy equivalences, while insisting on its contemporary relevance.
Melissa Harrison's The Stubborn Light of Things is Apple's top-rated nature podcast. Here is a selection of extracts from the series, which Melissa recorded in the spring, summer and autumn of 2020. It ties in with her book, The Stubborn Light of Things, a nature diary published in November 2020. Melissa Harrison is the acclaimed author of the novels At Hawthorn Time and All Among the Barley.
Listen to the podcast here: https://melissaharrison.co.uk/podcast/ Find out about the book here: https://melissaharrison.co.uk/books/
Audio production and editing by Peter Rogers: https://twitter.com/whistlebump
Randomly Moving Particles is built from two long poems that form its opening and close, connected by three shorter pieces. The title poem, in a kaleidoscope of compelling scenes, engages with subjects that include migration, placement, loss, space exploration and current British and American politics. It is a clarifying action and reaction between terra and solar system, mundanity and possibility, taking us from the grit of road surfaces to the distant glimpses of satellites. The final poem, ‘How Do the Dead Walk’, combines mythic reach with acute observation of the familiar, in order to address issues of contemporary violence. It is altogether more dreamlike, even in its tangibly military moments, grasping as it does at phantoms and intermediate plains.
Andrew Motion’s expansive new poetry collection is direct in its emotional appeal, ambitious in its scope, all the while retaining the cinematic vision and startling expression that so freshly lit the lines of his last, Essex Clay.
O Positive is the long-awaited debut collection of poetry from Joe Dunthorne, and it has all the appeal of his widely acclaimed fiction.
Adopting a sunny, genial tone, Dunthorne lures the reader to darker places, exploring death and dread, failure and regret – the ‘lounge of our suffering’. Often, he catches us off-guard: a ‘whiplash’ effect where poems shift from laughter to slaughter in a moment. Impertinent owls, an immersive theatre troupe, ancient men from the Great War and idiot balloonists – such characters dramatise our human fancies and foibles, joining the protagonist in scenarios both humorously bizarre and all-too-familiar. These performances serve to probe and unpeel the layers of the self – all the way down to the raw.
Simon Hall reads from the opening of his history book Ten Days in Harlem: Fidel Castro and the Making of the 1960s.
Rising star Simon Hall captures the spirit of the 1960s in ten days that revolutionised the Cold War: Fidel Castro's visit to New York.
'Hall has captured this catalytic moment like no one before. Anyone interested in the "Global Sixties" must read Ten Days in Harlem.' Van E. Gosse, Professor of History, Franklin & Marshall College
New York City, September 1960. Fidel Castro - champion of the oppressed, scourge of colonialism, and leftist revolutionary - arrives for the opening of the United Nations General Assembly. His visit to the UN represents a golden opportunity to make his mark on the world stage. Fidel's shock arrival in Harlem is met with a rapturous reception from the local African American community. He holds court from the iconic Hotel Theresa as a succession of world leaders, black freedom fighters and counter-cultural luminaries - everyone from Nikita Khrushchev to Gamal Abdel Nasser, Malcolm X to Allen Ginsberg - come calling. Then, during his landmark address to the UN General Assembly - one of the longest speeches in the organisation's history - he promotes the politics of anti-imperialism with a fervour, and an audacity, that makes him an icon of the 1960s.
In this unforgettable slice of modern history, Simon Hall reveals how these ten days were a foundational moment in the trajectory of the Cold War, a turning point in the history of anti-colonial struggle, and a launching pad for the social, cultural and political tumult of the decade that followed.
Simon Hall reads from the opening of his history book Ten Days in Harlem: Fidel Castro and the Making of the 1960s.
Rising star Simon Hall captures the spirit of the 1960s in ten days that revolutionised the Cold War: Fidel Castro's visit to New York.
'Hall has captured this catalytic moment like no one before. Anyone interested in the "Global Sixties" must read Ten Days in Harlem.' Van E. Gosse, Professor of History, Franklin & Marshall College
New York City, September 1960. Fidel Castro - champion of the oppressed, scourge of colonialism, and leftist revolutionary - arrives for the opening of the United Nations General Assembly. His visit to the UN represents a golden opportunity to make his mark on the world stage. Fidel's shock arrival in Harlem is met with a rapturous reception from the local African American community. He holds court from the iconic Hotel Theresa as a succession of world leaders, black freedom fighters and counter-cultural luminaries - everyone from Nikita Khrushchev to Gamal Abdel Nasser, Malcolm X to Allen Ginsberg - come calling. Then, during his landmark address to the UN General Assembly - one of the longest speeches in the organisation's history - he promotes the politics of anti-imperialism with a fervour, and an audacity, that makes him an icon of the 1960s.
In this unforgettable slice of modern history, Simon Hall reveals how these ten days were a foundational moment in the trajectory of the Cold War, a turning point in the history of anti-colonial struggle, and a launching pad for the social, cultural and political tumult of the decade that followed.
Simon Hall reads from the opening of his history book Ten Days in Harlem: Fidel Castro and the Making of the 1960s.
Rising star Simon Hall captures the spirit of the 1960s in ten days that revolutionised the Cold War: Fidel Castro's visit to New York.
'Hall has captured this catalytic moment like no one before. Anyone interested in the "Global Sixties" must read Ten Days in Harlem.' Van E. Gosse, Professor of History, Franklin & Marshall College
New York City, September 1960. Fidel Castro - champion of the oppressed, scourge of colonialism, and leftist revolutionary - arrives for the opening of the United Nations General Assembly. His visit to the UN represents a golden opportunity to make his mark on the world stage. Fidel's shock arrival in Harlem is met with a rapturous reception from the local African American community. He holds court from the iconic Hotel Theresa as a succession of world leaders, black freedom fighters and counter-cultural luminaries - everyone from Nikita Khrushchev to Gamal Abdel Nasser, Malcolm X to Allen Ginsberg - come calling. Then, during his landmark address to the UN General Assembly - one of the longest speeches in the organisation's history - he promotes the politics of anti-imperialism with a fervour, and an audacity, that makes him an icon of the 1960s.
In this unforgettable slice of modern history, Simon Hall reveals how these ten days were a foundational moment in the trajectory of the Cold War, a turning point in the history of anti-colonial struggle, and a launching pad for the social, cultural and political tumult of the decade that followed.
Simon Hall reads from the opening of his history book Ten Days in Harlem: Fidel Castro and the Making of the 1960s.
Rising star Simon Hall captures the spirit of the 1960s in ten days that revolutionised the Cold War: Fidel Castro's visit to New York.
'Hall has captured this catalytic moment like no one before. Anyone interested in the "Global Sixties" must read Ten Days in Harlem.' Van E. Gosse, Professor of History, Franklin & Marshall College
New York City, September 1960. Fidel Castro - champion of the oppressed, scourge of colonialism, and leftist revolutionary - arrives for the opening of the United Nations General Assembly. His visit to the UN represents a golden opportunity to make his mark on the world stage. Fidel's shock arrival in Harlem is met with a rapturous reception from the local African American community. He holds court from the iconic Hotel Theresa as a succession of world leaders, black freedom fighters and counter-cultural luminaries - everyone from Nikita Khrushchev to Gamal Abdel Nasser, Malcolm X to Allen Ginsberg - come calling. Then, during his landmark address to the UN General Assembly - one of the longest speeches in the organisation's history - he promotes the politics of anti-imperialism with a fervour, and an audacity, that makes him an icon of the 1960s.
In this unforgettable slice of modern history, Simon Hall reveals how these ten days were a foundational moment in the trajectory of the Cold War, a turning point in the history of anti-colonial struggle, and a launching pad for the social, cultural and political tumult of the decade that followed.
Simon Hall reads from the opening of his history book Ten Days in Harlem: Fidel Castro and the Making of the 1960s.
Rising star Simon Hall captures the spirit of the 1960s in ten days that revolutionised the Cold War: Fidel Castro's visit to New York.
'Hall has captured this catalytic moment like no one before. Anyone interested in the "Global Sixties" must read Ten Days in Harlem.' Van E. Gosse, Professor of History, Franklin & Marshall College
New York City, September 1960. Fidel Castro - champion of the oppressed, scourge of colonialism, and leftist revolutionary - arrives for the opening of the United Nations General Assembly. His visit to the UN represents a golden opportunity to make his mark on the world stage. Fidel's shock arrival in Harlem is met with a rapturous reception from the local African American community. He holds court from the iconic Hotel Theresa as a succession of world leaders, black freedom fighters and counter-cultural luminaries - everyone from Nikita Khrushchev to Gamal Abdel Nasser, Malcolm X to Allen Ginsberg - come calling. Then, during his landmark address to the UN General Assembly - one of the longest speeches in the organisation's history - he promotes the politics of anti-imperialism with a fervour, and an audacity, that makes him an icon of the 1960s.
In this unforgettable slice of modern history, Simon Hall reveals how these ten days were a foundational moment in the trajectory of the Cold War, a turning point in the history of anti-colonial struggle, and a launching pad for the social, cultural and political tumult of the decade that followed.
Simon Hall reads from the opening of his history book Ten Days in Harlem: Fidel Castro and the Making of the 1960s.
Rising star Simon Hall captures the spirit of the 1960s in ten days that revolutionised the Cold War: Fidel Castro's visit to New York.
'Hall has captured this catalytic moment like no one before. Anyone interested in the "Global Sixties" must read Ten Days in Harlem.' Van E. Gosse, Professor of History, Franklin & Marshall College
New York City, September 1960. Fidel Castro - champion of the oppressed, scourge of colonialism, and leftist revolutionary - arrives for the opening of the United Nations General Assembly. His visit to the UN represents a golden opportunity to make his mark on the world stage. Fidel's shock arrival in Harlem is met with a rapturous reception from the local African American community. He holds court from the iconic Hotel Theresa as a succession of world leaders, black freedom fighters and counter-cultural luminaries - everyone from Nikita Khrushchev to Gamal Abdel Nasser, Malcolm X to Allen Ginsberg - come calling. Then, during his landmark address to the UN General Assembly - one of the longest speeches in the organisation's history - he promotes the politics of anti-imperialism with a fervour, and an audacity, that makes him an icon of the 1960s.
In this unforgettable slice of modern history, Simon Hall reveals how these ten days were a foundational moment in the trajectory of the Cold War, a turning point in the history of anti-colonial struggle, and a launching pad for the social, cultural and political tumult of the decade that followed.
Nicola Upson reads an extract from Sorry for the Dead, which is Longlisted for the CWA Sapere Books Historial Dagger 2020.
Summer, 1915: a young woman falls to her death at Charleston Farmhouse on the Sussex Downs. But was it an accident?
Twenty years later, Josephine Tey is faced with the accusation that it was murder, and that she was complicit in the crime. Can she clear her name and uncover the truth, exposing the darkest secrets of that apparently idyllic summer?
'Haunting . . . Superlative.' Sunday Times Crime Book of the Month
'A terrific novel.' A. N. Wilson
Nicola Upson's debut novel, An Expert in Murder, was the first in a series of crime novels whose main character is Josephine Tey, who - along with Agatha Christie - was one of the masters of Britain's Golden Age of crime writing. The most recent book in the series, Nine Lessons, was shortlisted for the CWA Historical Dagger in 2018.
BUY THE BOOK: Waterstones: https://www.waterstones.com/book/sorry-for-the-dead/nicola-upson/9780571337378 Amazon: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Sorry-Dead-Josephine-Tey-8/dp/0571337376/ Foyles: https://www.foyles.co.uk/witem/fiction-poetry/sorry-for-the-dead,nicola-upson-nicola-upson-9780571337378 Hive: https://www.hive.co.uk/Product/Nicola-Upson/Sorry-for-the-Dead/24940143
Ebook: Kindle: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Sorry-Dead-Nicola-Upson-ebook/dp/B07V6RM6GK/
Adventurous and illuminating, Matthew Francis’s new poetry collection is full of flight, air and possibility. Read by the author.
Matthew Francis’s 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. There are tributes to the poets Basho, Dafydd ap Gwilym and W. S. Graham, to fireworks, apple varieties, and hot toddies. And, in a moving elegy for a friend killed in a parachute accident, Francis shows us a vertiginous vision of a world where even the dead ‘sleep on the wing’.
Flèche (the French word for ‘arrow’) is an offensive technique commonly used in fencing, a sport of Mary Jean Chan’s young adult years, when she competed locally and internationally for her home city, Hong Kong. This cross-linguistic pun presents the queer, non-white body as both vulnerable (‘flesh’) and weaponised (‘flèche’), and evokes the difficulties of reconciling one’s need for safety alongside the desire to shed one’s protective armour in order to fully embrace the world.
Central to the collection is the figure of the poet’s mother, whose fragmented memories of political turmoil in twentieth-century China are sensitively threaded through the book in an eight-part poetic sequence, combined with recollections from Chan’s childhood. As complex themes of multilingualism, queerness, psychoanalysis and cultural history emerge, so too does a richly imagined personal, maternal and national biography. The result is a series of poems that feel urgent and true, dazzling and devastating by turns.
Taken from Julia Copus’s collection, Girlhood, – a book of transgressed boundaries and seductive veneers. Restlessly inquisitive, it exposes the shifting power balance between things on the verge of becoming and the forces that threaten to destroy them.
Reading these poems, we have the sense of encountering a series of filmic installations arranged by episode in a gallery. Lost, censored or disparaged voices speak out from secluded spaces and moments of hidden history: from within a professor’s office and a deserted department store; from kitchens, bedrooms, hallways and upstairs windows; through changing weathers, fidgety shadows and the witching hour.
Girlhood concludes with a sequence set in a psychiatric hospital that reimagines Jacques Lacan’s treatment of his most famous case study, Marguerite Pantaine. This dramatic meeting of minds has us questioning who is the more delusional – doctor or patient: like other victims in this exhilarating new collection, Marguerite may initially appear vanquished, but a closer look reveals how little of herself she has really surrendered.
'An immersive, polyphonic adventure.' Deborah Levy
Celebrating 100 years since first publication of 'modernism's lost masterpiece' (Julia Briggs).
In just twenty-two pages, Hope Mirrlees combines sensuous psychogeography with modernist avant garde poetics to create a dazzling single-day journey through interwar Paris in the eyes of a jaded flâneuse. Sights, smells, music, gem-encrusted tortoises, shrouded monuments – it's a truly glorious and immersive evocation of Paris in the springtime.
The cover of our edition is inspired by Sonia Delaunay's modernist designs, while she was living in Paris in the 1920s (with thanks to Eleanor Crow). The text inside reproduces, in Caslon Old Face type, the layout of the Hogarth Press edition (with thanks to Kate Ward).
Deborah Levy summons the spirit of this 'fiercely independent, young and spirited, flawed and brilliant female writer' in her introductory foreword, Julia Briggs's line-by-line commentary unveils the verse's intricate allusions, while Mirrlees's biographer Sandeep Parmar summarises the social and biographical context in her afterword.
Hope Mirrlees (1887–1978) was a British translator, poet and novelist. She published three novels in her lifetime, Madeleine: One of Love’s Jansenists (1919), The Counterplot (1924) and the fantasy novel Lud-in-the-Mist (1926); three slim volumes of poetry, which culminated in Moods and Tensions (1976); and A Fly in Amber (1962), a biography of the British antiquarian Sir Robert Bruce Cotton.
With thanks to Charlotte Rampling, Lambert Wilson and Director James Lever, © Hope Mirrlees estate
Manhattan is a Lenape Word
Natalie Diaz
It is December and we must be brave.
The ambulance’s rose of light blooming against the window. Its single siren-cry: Help me. A silk-red shadow unbolting like water through the orchard of her thigh.
Her, come—in the green night, a lion. I sleep her bees with my mouth of smoke, dip honey with my hands stung sweet on the darksome hive. Out of the eater I eat. Meaning, She is mine, colony.
The things I know aren’t easy: I’m the only Native American on the 8th floor of this hotel or any, looking out any window of a turn-of-the-century building in Manhattan.
Manhattan is a Lenape word. Even a watch must be wound. How can a century or a heart turn if nobody asks, Where have all the natives gone?
If you are where you are, then where are those who are not here? Not here. Which is why in this city I have many lovers. All my loves are reparations loves.
What is loneliness if not unimaginable light and measured in lumens— an electric bill which must be paid, a taxi cab floating across three lanes with its lamp lit, gold in wanting. At 2 a.m. everyone in New York City is empty and asking for someone.
Again, the siren’s same wide note: Help me. Meaning, I have a gift and it is my body, made two-handed of gods and bronze.
She says, You make me feel like lightning. I say, I don’t ever want to make you feel that white. It’s too late—I can’t stop seeing her bones. I’m counting the carpals, metacarpals of her hand inside me.
One bone, the lunate bone, is named for its crescent outline. Lunatus. Luna. Some nights she rises like that in me, like trouble—a slow luminous flux.
The streetlamp beckons the lonely coyote wandering West 29th Street by offering its long wrist of light. The coyote answers by lifting its head and crying stars.
Somewhere far from New York City, an American drone finds then loves a body—the radiant nectar it seeks through great darkness—makes a candle-hour of it, and burns gently along it, like American touch, an unbearable heat.
The siren song returns in me, I sing it across her throat: Am I what I love? Is this the glittering world I’ve been begging for?
Ilya Kaminsky reads We Lived Happily During the War, from Deaf Republic.
We Lived Happily During the War BY ILYA KAMINSKY
And when they bombed other people’s houses, we
protested but not enough, we opposed them but not
enough. I was in my bed, around my bed America
was falling: invisible house by invisible house by invisible house.
I took a chair outside and watched the sun.
In the sixth month of a disastrous reign in the house of money
in the street of money in the city of money in the country of money, our great country of money, we (forgive us)
lived happily during the war.
A piercing scream, shattering the evening calm, brings Superintendent Adam Dalgliesh hurrying from his literary party to the nearby Steen Psychiatric Clinic, where he discovers the body of a woman sprawled on the basement floor, a chisel thrust through her heart. As Dalgliesh probes beneath the apparently unruffled calm of the clinic, he discovers that many an intrigue lies hidden behind the Georgian terrace's unassuming façade. Professionally, he has never known the taste of failure. Now, for the first time, he feels unsure of his own mastery as he battles to unmask a cool killer who is proving to be his intellectual equal, and who is poised to strike again.A Mind To Murder is the second novel to feature Superintendent Adam Dalgliesh from the bestselling author of Death Comes To Pemberley, Death in Holy Orders and The Children of Men. In 1995 the novel was adapted into a hit film and starred Roy Marsden as the inspector protagonist.
A journey into the heartland of psychiatry.
This book debunks myths, challenges assumptions and offers fresh insight into what it means to be mentally ill.
And what it means to be human.
This is an extract from Costa Prize-winner Nathan Filer's This Book Will Change Your Mind About Mental Health, read by the author.
'I cannot recommend it highly enough.' Caitlin Moran
'Brims with compassion and wit.' Cathy Rentzenbrink
'Absolutely blew me away.' Jo Brand
'Brilliant . . . I love it.' Phillippa Perry
'I have never read a more powerful book about mental health.' Joanna Cannon
This Book Will Change Your Mind About Mental Health was previously published in 2019 under the title The Heartland.
BUY NOW from your local bookshop or these online retailers: Audible: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Heartland-Finding-Losing-Schizophrenia/dp/B07PFY79KB/ Apple: https://books.apple.com/gb/audiobook/this-book-will-change-your-mind-about-mental-health/id1466165868 KIndle: https://www.amazon.co.uk/This-Change-About-Mental-Health-ebook/dp/B07ZG5CT6V Faber paperback: https://www.faber.co.uk/catalog/product/view/id/7444/s/9780571345977-this-book-will-change-your-mind-about-mental-health/ Waterstones paperback: https://www.waterstones.com/book/this-book-will-change-your-mind-about-mental-health/nathan-filer/9780571345977 Hive paperback: https://www.hive.co.uk/Product/Nathan-Filer/This-Book-Will-Change-Your-Mind-About-Mental-Health--A-jo/24462364 Foyles paperback: https://www.foyles.co.uk/witem/health-wellbeing/this-book-will-change-your-mind-about,nathan-filer-9780571345977 Amazon paperback: https://www.amazon.co.uk/This-Change-About-Mental-Health/dp/0571345972/
A journey into the heartland of psychiatry.
This book debunks myths, challenges assumptions and offers fresh insight into what it means to be mentally ill.
And what it means to be human.
This is an extract from Costa Prize-winner Nathan Filer's This Book Will Change Your Mind About Mental Health, read by the author.
'I cannot recommend it highly enough.' Caitlin Moran
'Brims with compassion and wit.' Cathy Rentzenbrink
'Absolutely blew me away.' Jo Brand
'Brilliant . . . I love it.' Phillippa Perry
'I have never read a more powerful book about mental health.' Joanna Cannon
This Book Will Change Your Mind About Mental Health was previously published in 2019 under the title The Heartland.
BUY NOW from your local bookshop or these online retailers: Audible: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Heartland-Finding-Losing-Schizophrenia/dp/B07PFY79KB/ Apple: https://books.apple.com/gb/audiobook/this-book-will-change-your-mind-about-mental-health/id1466165868 KIndle: https://www.amazon.co.uk/This-Change-About-Mental-Health-ebook/dp/B07ZG5CT6V Faber paperback: https://www.faber.co.uk/catalog/product/view/id/7444/s/9780571345977-this-book-will-change-your-mind-about-mental-health/ Waterstones paperback: https://www.waterstones.com/book/this-book-will-change-your-mind-about-mental-health/nathan-filer/9780571345977 Hive paperback: https://www.hive.co.uk/Product/Nathan-Filer/This-Book-Will-Change-Your-Mind-About-Mental-Health--A-jo/24462364 Foyles paperback: https://www.foyles.co.uk/witem/health-wellbeing/this-book-will-change-your-mind-about,nathan-filer-9780571345977 Amazon paperback: https://www.amazon.co.uk/This-Change-About-Mental-Health/dp/0571345972/
‘Writing poems is a conundrum for me, not my professional identity, but a passion as deep as memory.'
We're pleased to announce Barbara Kingsolver's revelatory poetry collection, How to Fly (In Ten Thousand Easy Lessons).
How to Fly (In Ten Thousand Easy Lessons) offers emotionally rich reflections on the practical, the spiritual and the wild. The book’s interwoven sections form a carefully patterned whole, from its ‘How to’ poems balancing wry pragmatism with illuminating wisdom, to its quiet, clear-eyed elegies examining death as a vivid slice of life. From start to finish, the poignant meditations in this generous collection trace the complex ties that bind us to one another, and to an untamed world beyond ourselves. In more intimate terms than ever before, Kingsolver dares the reader into a deeper embrace of all that lies between birth and death. ‘Begin with a quailing heart’, she writes, ‘for here you stand on the fault line.’
In her first collection of new poetry since 2011’s acclaimed Family Values, Wendy Cope celebrates ‘the half-forgotten stories of our lives’ with compassion, wisdom and wit. Cope continues to be the most generous of authors, sharing her experience of childhood and marriage and writing poignantly about the passing of time. In several of the poems she reimagines Shakespeare in unorthodox fashion; in others she offers heartfelt tributes to friends and to public figures including Eric Morecambe and John Cage.
Anecdotal Evidence demonstrates the formal brilliance and empathetic insight which have delighted readers for years, and shows why Wendy Cope is one of our best-loved poets.
Ishion Hutchinson reads an extract of Marina by T.S Eliot. Hear the whole poem here: #ShareAPoem
‘The most perfect microscopic structures in the known universe’ – that is the exquisite description of sub-nuclear scattering amplitudes given by theorist Lance Dixon, based at the Stanford Linear Accelerator in California. Having made his name as a string theorist in the 1980s, Dixon became one of the leading pioneers in the field of scattering-amplitudes, developing a host of ingenious ideas and techniques. In this thoughtful interview, he describes why he switched his research focus, the fascination and importance of the amplitudes, and the prospects for the subject’s future.
This is one of twenty interviews given by world-class experts to Graham on the themes he explores in his new book The Universe Speaks in Numbers. A new interview is posted every week.
Among the other interviewees are Michael Atiyah, Ruth Britto, Simon Donaldson, Freeman Dyson, Juan Maldacena, Michela Massimi, Roger Penrose, Martin Rees, Simon Schaffer, Lenny Susskind and Edward Witten.
https://www.faber.co.uk/9780571321803-the-universe-speaks-in-numbers.html
The Dutchman Robbert Dijkgraaf is a rarity – not only is he a top-class mathematical physicist, he is also one of the world’s finest science communicators. In this bracing interview with Graham, Dijkgraaf lucidly describes the state of modern fundamental physics and the continually surprising – and extraordinarily productive – symbiosis between this science and modern mathematics. As Graham says: ‘Robbert gives us a real tour de force.’This is one of twenty interviews given by world-class experts to Graham on the themes he explores in his new book The Universe Speaks in Numbers. A new interview is posted every week.
Among the other interviewees are Michael Atiyah, Ruth Britto, Simon Donaldson, Freeman Dyson, Juan Maldacena, Michela Massimi, Roger Penrose, Martin Rees, Simon Schaffer, Lenny Susskind and Edward Witten.
https://www.faber.co.uk/9780571321803-the-universe-speaks-in-numbers.html
Science writer Graham Farmelo in conversation with Greg Moore.
Physics and mathematics seem to be in ‘pre-established harmony’, a phrase that has long been popular with physicists and mathematicians working at the subjects’ interface. Greg Moore, based at Rutgers University, has discovered many surprising new relationships between quantum field theories and the string framework and concepts in contemporary mathematics. In this interview, he eloquently describes examples of this and explains why he is promoting the notion of ‘physical mathematics’, a discipline that he believes is now well established, with a bright future.
This is one of twenty interviews given by world-class experts to Graham on the themes he explores in his new book The Universe Speaks in Numbers. A new interview is posted every week.
Among the other interviewees are Michael Atiyah, Ruth Britto, Simon Donaldson, Freeman Dyson, Juan Maldacena, Roger Penrose, Martin Rees, Simon Schaffer, Lenny Susskind and Edward Witten. https://www.faber.co.uk/9780571321803-the-universe-speaks-in-numbers.html
Science writer Graham Farmelo in conversation with Freeman Dyson. Freeman Dyson talks about his being both a theoretical physicist and a mathematician, the troubled relationship between mathematics and physics in his youth, the impressive physicist he knew (no, it’s not Feynman) and string theory. This interview was recorded last summer at the IAS, Princeton, in Freeman’s office – and he’s as lively, counter-orthodox and fearless as ever.
This is one of twenty interviews given by world-class experts to Graham on the themes he explores in his new book The Universe Speaks in Numbers. A new interview is posted every week.
Among the other interviewees are Michael Atiyah, Ruth Britto, Simon Donaldson, Freeman Dyson, Juan Maldacena, Greg Moore, Roger Penrose, Martin Rees, Simon Schaffer, Lenny Susskind and Edward Witten. https://www.faber.co.uk/9780571321803-the-universe-speaks-in-numbers.html
What do philosophers of physics do, and what light might they shed on the work of today’s physicists and astronomers? Michela Massimi, a distinguished philosopher of science at the University of Edinburgh, discusses these and other matters with Graham in this lively interview, recorded last March in Michela’s office. She has a bracingly optimistic vision for her subject in the coming decades, as Graham heard.
This is one of twenty interviews given by world-class experts to Graham on the themes he explores in his new book The Universe Speaks in Numbers. A new interview is posted every week.
Among the other interviewees are Michael Atiyah, Ruth Britto, Simon Donaldson, Freeman Dyson, Juan Maldacena, Greg Moore, Roger Penrose, Martin Rees, Simon Schaffer, Lenny Susskind and Edward Witten. https://www.faber.co.uk/9780571321803-the-universe-speaks-in-numbers.html
Schizophrenia: whether it’s the associations it conjures or the people it brings to mind, it is a word we all have a view on. How we perceive it – and how we treat people living with it – is at the core of how we understand mental health.
But what do we really know? How much time do we spend listening? Do we truly comprehend this complex and often contradictory diagnosis?
In The Heartland Nathan Filer, mental health nurse and award winning writer, takes us on a journey into the psychiatric wards he once worked on. He also invites us to spend time with world-leading experts, and with some extraordinary people who share their own stories – true stories – about living with this strange and misunderstood condition.
The Heartland debunks myths, challenges assumptions and offers fresh insight into what it means to be mad.
And what it means to be human.
'Erudite, well-researched, and full of compassion... This book will change the way people understand schizophrenia, and that change is long overdue.' CHRISTIE WATSON, author of The Language of Kindness
'A truly important book. ' MAX PORTER, author of Grief is the Thing with Feathers and Lanny
'I have never read a more powerful book about mental health… it has the ability to change the way people think about mental illness.' JOANNA CANNON, author of The Trouble with Goats and Sheep
'Absolutely blew me away... I cannot think of another book in the field that would come close to this. In my opinion it is an essential read for those in the mental health arena and anyone whose relative has been touched with a diagnosis of schizophrenia.' JO BRAND
Science writer Graham Farmelo in conversation with Juan Maldacena. Juan Maldacena has been described as the first great theoretician of the twenty-first century. In a series of brilliantly imaginative insights, he has enriched our understanding of gravity, space-time and black holes. During this relaxed and informative interview with Graham, recorded last summer in Princeton, Maldacena describes how he became interested in modern physics, his astonishing discovery of an equivalence between a string theory and a quantum field theory. He also gives his views about the current state of our understanding of the universe and prospects for the future of theoretical physics.
Based on Graham Farmelo's book The Universe Speaks in Numbers. https://www.faber.co.uk/9780571321803-the-universe-speaks-in-numbers.html
Science writer Graham Farmelo in conversation with Sir Roger Penrose. Sir Roger Penrose, a hybrid mathematician-cosmologist, is one of the most accomplished scientific thinkers of the past fifty years. In this compelling interview with Graham, Penrose describes some of the key events of his remarkable career.
Based on Graham Farmelo's book The Universe Speaks in Numbers. https://www.faber.co.uk/9780571321803-the-universe-speaks-in-numbers.html
Science writer Graham Farmelo in conversation with Nima Arkani-Hamed(part 2). This is the second part of Graham’s interview with Nima Arkani-Hamed, recorded at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. Here, Nima is in brilliant form as he recalls how he fell in love with scattering amplitudes – aptly described by the theoretician Lance Dixon as ‘the most perfect microscopic structures in the known universe.’
Based on Graham Farmelo's book The Universe Speaks in Numbers. https://www.faber.co.uk/9780571321803-the-universe-speaks-in-numbers.html
Science writer Graham Farmelo in conversation with Michael Green. Michael Green is one of the pioneers of the string framework. In collaboration with the Caltech theorist John Schwarz, he made a crucial breakthrough that led in 1984 to the what became known as the First String Revolution.
Based on Graham Farmelo's book The Universe Speaks in Numbers. https://www.faber.co.uk/9780571321803-the-universe-speaks-in-numbers.html
Science writer Graham Farmelo in conversation with Edward Witten. Edward Witten is widely regarded as the pre-eminent theoretical physicist of the past four decades. Based at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, he has made dozens of path-breaking contributions to both physics and mathematics.
Based on Graham Farmelo's book The Universe Speaks in Numbers. https://www.faber.co.uk/9780571321803-the-universe-speaks-in-numbers.html
Science writer Graham Farmelo in conversation with Val Gibson. Val Gibson is a leading experimental particle physicist and is head of the high energy physics research group at the Cavendish Laboratory at the University Cambridge. She is a prominent member of one of the teams of experimenters at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider, where the Higgs boson was discovered in 2012.
Based on Graham Farmelo's book The Universe Speaks in Numbers. https://www.faber.co.uk/9780571321803-the-universe-speaks-in-numbers.html
Science writer Graham Farmelo in conversation with Simon Schaffer. Simon Schaffer is not only a leading historian of science but also a great teacher. He is without peer in his ability to illuminate how thinking about thinking about the natural world developed into our modern understanding of physics, often in ways unknown to most physicists today.
Based on Graham Farmelo's book The Universe Speaks in Numbers. https://www.faber.co.uk/9780571321803-the-universe-speaks-in-numbers.html
Science writer Graham Farmelo in conversation with Sir Michael Atiyah. In an interview with Graham last November, Sir Michael Atiyah described how he became a ‘quasi-physicist. Ten weeks later, Atiyah was dead. He was one of the most accomplished mathematicians of the past century: no one had done more in the past decades to discover close links between pure mathematics and fundamental physics. Undoubtedly a great mind, he was also an indomitable spirit.
Based on Graham Farmelo's book The Universe Speaks in Numbers. https://www.faber.co.uk/9780571321803-the-universe-speaks-in-numbers.html
Science writer Graham Farmelo in conversation with leading theoretical physicist Nima Arkani-Hamed, who gave Graham an inspiring interview about the mysterious harmony between pure mathematics and fundamental physics. First of a two-part interview.
Based on Graham Farmelo's book The Universe Speaks in Numbers. https://www.faber.co.uk/9780571321803-the-universe-speaks-in-numbers.html
An extract from the incredible audiobook interpretation of the Sunday Times top ten bestselling novel Lanny by Max Porter, read by a cast of narrators.
Top Ten Sunday Times bestseller Shortlisted for Costa Book Awards 2018 'The best memoir I've ever read.' Dolly Alderton An audiobook extract from Viv Albertine's acclaimed autobiography To Throw Away Unopened, read by Jasmine Blackborrow.
Singer-songwriter, author and activist Billy Bragg reads from his new book The Three Dimensions of Freedom, in which he argues the urgent case for accountability. This is an extract from the audiobook of The Three Dimensions of Freedom, which is out now.
Listen to an audiobook extract from Louise Doughty's best-selling smash hit novel, Apple Tree Yard (later adapted into a BBC One drama starring Emily Watson). Read by Juliet Stevenson.
A short audiobook extract from Anna Burns' Milkman, the winner of the 2018 Man Booker Prize. Read by Brid Brennan.
Simon Armitage, the UK's new Poet Laureate, reads 'Last', a poem from his new book, Sandettie Light Vessel Automatic, which brings together work from across his writing career. This is an extract from the audiobook edition of Sandettie Light Vessel Automatic, available from all good audiobook retailers now.
In this exclusive audiobook extract from his new memoir Then It Fell Apart, Moby, riding high on the international success of his album Play, reflects on the pitfalls of fame.
Then It Fell Apart is available now as ebook, print edition and audiobook: http://moby.com/book/buy
In this audiobook extract from Then It Fell Apart, Moby recounts an evening spent at the home of David Bowie and Iman, along with Lou Reed and Laurie Anderson.
Then It Fell Apart, the new memoir from Moby is out now: http://moby.com/book/buy
Listen to an extract Then It Fell Apart, the latest memoir from Moby: a journey into the black hole of fame, a place where sex, drugs and rock 'n' roll seem to fasten the whole thing together – until it all starts to fall apart...
http://moby.com/book/buy
Poet Rachael Allen reads 'Prawns of Joe', from her debut collection Kingdomland (Faber & Faber, 2019).
Rachael Allen reads 'Monstrous Horses', taken from her debut poetry collection, Kingdomland (Faber & Faber, 2019).
Rachael Allen reads the poem 'Lunatic Urbaine' from her new collection, Kingdomland (Faber & Faber, 2019).
Faber Members Event 20/11/18. Josh Cohen discussions presentations of families in Sally Rooney's Conversation with Friends, as part of Faber Members' Literature & Psychoanalysis series.
Faber Members Event 12/11/18. Acclaimed conductor Mark Wigglesworth and renowned theatre director Nicholas Hytner discuss the many parallels between their professions.
Listen to Rachael Allen read the title poem from her debut collection, Kingdomland (published by Faber & Faber, January 2019).
A poem from the T. S. Eliot Prize-shortlisted collection Us, written and read by Zaffar Kunial.
'Prayer', read by Zaffar Kunial. Us, the debut collection by Zaffar Kunial is out now and is shortlisted for the T. S. Eliot Prize for Poetry 2018.
Award-winning poet Zaffar Kunial reads 'The Word', a poem from his debut collection, Us (Faber & Faber 2018).
Listen to Zaffar Kunial reading his poem 'Self Portrait as Bottom', taken from his debut collection, Us (2018).
In this exclusive chapter extract from the recently released Beastie Boys Book audiobook, Michael 'Mike D' Diamond describes the experience of seeing Black Flag at the Peppermint Lounge in 1981, a gig that would be a catalyst for a number of bands forming, including the Beastie Boys.
Formed as a New York City hardcore band in 1981, Beastie Boys struck an unlikely path to global hip-hop superstardom. Here is their story, told for the first time in the words of band members, Adam "AD-ROCK" Horovitz and Michael "Mike D" Diamond.
Over 40 A-list stars narrate the Beastie Boys Book audiobook including, Steve Buscemi, Jarvis Cocker, Elvis Costello, Chuck D, Nadia Dajani, Michael Diamond, Snoop Dogg, Will Ferrell, Kim Gordon, Adam Horovitz, LL Cool J, Spike Jonze, Bette Midler, Mix Master Mike, NAS, Amy Poehler, Chloe Sevigny, Jon Stewart, Ben Stiller and many more.
In this clip, Adam Horovitz reads from Wild Card (An Introduction)
Book to Book is a podcast from Faber, inviting authors to discuss their new work and a book that inspired them. In this third episode, hosted by George Miller, he interviews Sue Prideaux, author of a revelatory new biography of Friedrich Nietzsche, I Am Dynamite!
Book to Book is a podcast from Faber, inviting authors to discuss their new work and a book that inspired them. In this second episode, hosted by George Miller, he interviews travel writer William Atkins about his new book The Immeasurable World: Journeys in Desert Places.
Book to Book is a podcast from Faber, inviting authors to discuss their new work and a book that inspired them. In this first edition, hosted by George Miller, he interviews naturalist and Guardian writer Stephen Moss, about his new book Mrs Moreau's Warbler: How Birds Got Their Names.
https://www.guardianbookshop.com/mrs-moreau-s-warbler.html
An Extract from Ishiguro's 'The UnConsoled' – an extraordinary and original study of a man whose life has accelerated beyond his control. https://www.faber.co.uk/9780571283897-the-unconsoled.html
A clip of Academy Award-winning actor Jeremy Irons reading T. S. Eliot's 'The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock' from a landmark recording released April 2018. https://www.faber.co.uk/9780571342709-the-poems-of-t-s-eliot-read-by-jeremy-irons.html
An extract from 'Kismet' by Luke Tredget – a love story about imperfect people in a world obsessed with perfect matches. https://www.faber.co.uk/shop/fiction/9780571334872-kismet.html
Sophie Collins reads her poem 'Untitled', taken from her debut collection Who Is Mary Sue (Faber & Faber, 2018)
Sophie Collins reads her poem 'Who Is Mary Sue?' from her debut collection of the same name, published by Faber in February 2018.
Hannah Sullivan reads 'You, Very Young in New York' from her debut collection, THREE POEMS.
Jonathan Aris reads from Luke Harding's explosve book Collusion, on the Trump/Russia scandal. Audiobook: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Collusion-Russia-Helped-Trump-White/dp/B0783QTRJ3/ref=tmm_aud_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=1512061880&sr=1-1-spell
Here's John Lloyd introducing the joys of the new QI book, 1,423 QI FACTS TO BOWL YOU OVER.
Collusion by Luke Harding is a gripping exposé about the biggest political scandal of the modern era, and #1 New York Times bestseller. This is an extract of the audiobook, read by Jonathan Aris.
Moscow, July 1987. Real-estate tycoon Donald Trump visits Soviet Russia for the first time at the invitation of the government.
London, December 2016. Luke Harding meets former MI6 officer Christopher Steele to discuss the president-elect's connections with Russia. Harding follows two leads: money and sex.
Washington, January 2017. Steele's explosive dossier alleges that the Kremlin has been 'cultivating, supporting, and assisting' Trump for years and that they have compromising information about him. Trump responds on twitter, 'FAKE NEWS.'
In Collusion, award-winning journalist Luke Harding reveals the true nature of Trump's decades-long relationship with Russia and presents the gripping inside story of the dossier. It features exclusive new material and draws on sources from the intelligence community.
Harding tells an astonishing story of offshore money, sketchy real-estate deals, a Miss Universe Pageant, mobsters, money laundering, hacking and Kremlin espionage. He shines a light on powerful Russian players like Aras Agalarov, Natalia Veselnitskaya and Sergey Kislyak, whose motivations and instructions may have come from Vladimir Putin himself.
The special prosecutor, Robert Mueller, has already indicted several of the American protagonists, including Trump's campaign manager, Paul Manafort. More charges are likely as the crisis engulfs Trump's administration. This audiobook gets to the heart of the biggest political scandal of the modern era. Russia is reshaping the world order to its advantage - this is something that should trouble us all.
BUY THE AUDIO: Apple: https://books.apple.com/gb/audiobook/collusion-how-russia-helped-trump-win-white-house-unabridged/id1316120538 Audible: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Collusion-Russia-Helped-Trump-White/dp/B0783QTRJ3/
The poet Ishion Hutchinson reads 'Moved by The Beauty Of Trees', which features in his collection, 'House of Lords and Commons' (Faber & Faber 2017).
Ishion Hutchinson reads his poem 'The Lords and Commons of Summer' taken from his new collection 'House of Lords and Commons' (published by Faber & Faber 02.11.2017) https://www.faber.co.uk/shop/poetry/9780571340149-house-of-lords-and-commons.html
The award-winning poet Ishion Hutchinson reads his poem, 'After the Hurricane' from his collection 'House of Lords and Commons.' See: www.faber.co.uk/shop/poetry/9780571340149-house-of-lords-and-commons.html
Daljit Nagra discusses his poetic practices and his most recent collection British Museum (2017) with George Miller.
The second part of David Keenan's, author of This Is Memorial Device, takeover of Faber Social.
A poem read by Emily Berry, taken from her most recent collection Stranger, Baby, published by Faber in February 2017.
Award-winning poet Emily Berry reads her poem 'Everything Bad is Permanent', which features in her second collection, Stranger, Baby.
03 Chinese Moon "Thrumming" from Hitch In Time/Thrumming/Phasing (ST-101) by FaberBooks
Bestselling playwright and author Alan Bennett reads an exclusive extract from his new book, Keeping On Keeping On (Profile Books and Faber & Faber, 2016).
Alan Bennett reads an extract from his latest colecction of diaries, Keeping On Keeping On (2016).
Alan Bennett reads an excerpt from Keeping On Keeping On, out now from Faber & Faber and Profile Books.
Alan Bennett reads from his latest collection of prose, Keeping On Keeping On (co-published by Faber and Profile Books, 2016).
Alan Bennett reads an excerpt from his diary, published in Keeping On Keeping On (Faber & Faber/Profile Books, 2016).
Jenny Agutter reads from the audiobook of P.D. James' The Mistletoe Murder.
As the acknowledged 'Queen of Crime', P. D. James was frequently commissioned by newspapers and magazines to write a special short story for Christmas. Four of the best of these have been drawn from the archives and published here. P. D. James's prose illuminates each of these perfectly formed stories, making them ideal reading for the darkest days of the year. While she delights in the secrets that lurk beneath the surface at family gatherings, her Christmas stories also provide tantalizing puzzles to keep the reader guessing.
P. D. James embraces the challenge of the short-story form, and ingeniously weaves the strands of plot, setting, characterisation and surprise to create a satisfying whole within only a few thousand words.
From the title story about a strained country-house party on Christmas Eve, to another about an illicit affair that ends in murder, and two cases for James's poet-detective Adam Dalgliesh, each treats the reader to James's masterfully atmospheric storytelling, always with the lure of a mystery to be solved.
Michael Dickman reads "Dead Brother Superhero" from the collection Brother, dual-authored by Michael Dickman and his twin brother Matthew Dickman.
American poet Matthew Dickman reads "Satellite" from the dual-authored volume Brother by Matthew Dickman and Michael Dickman.
Michael Dickman reads "Killing Flies", a poem from the dual-authored collection Brother by Michael Dickman and Matthew Dickman.
Matthew Dickman reads his poem "Cloud", which features in the collection Brother by Matthew Dickman and Michael Dickman.
The American poets, and twin brothers, Matthew and Michael Dickman discuss their working practices, poetic influences and their new dual-authored collection Brother with George Miller.
American poet Michael Dickman reads "The New Green" from the collection Brother by Michael Dickman and Matthew Dickman.
Listen to Matthew Dickman read his poem "My Brother's Grave", taken from the new dual-authored volume Brother by Matthew Dickman and Michael Dickman.
The poet Frederick Seidel reads "Robespierre" taken from his latest collection, Widening Income Inequality.
The acclaimed American poet Frederick Seidel reads the poem "France Now" from his new collection, Widening Income Inequality.
A track inspired by Melissa Harrison's book RAIN, made using field recordings of English rainfall.
Artist anonymous.
In a London flat, two young boys face the unbearable sadness of their mother's sudden death. Their father, a Ted Hughes scholar and scruffy romantic, imagines a future of well-meaning visitors and emptiness.
In this moment of despair they are visited by Crow - antagonist, trickster, healer, babysitter. This sentimental bird is drawn to the grieving family and threatens to stay until they no longer need him.
As weeks turn to months and the pain of loss gives way to memories, the little unit of three starts to heal.
In this extraordinary debut - part novella, part polyphonic fable, part essay on grief - Max Porter's compassion and bravura style combine to dazzling effect. Full of unexpected humour and profound emotional truth, Grief Is the Thing with Feathers marks the arrival of a thrilling new talent.
'Rain: Four Walks in English Weather' is an evocative meditation on the English landscape in wet weather by the acclaimed novelist and nature writer, Melissa Harrison. In this podcast she reads from the book and explains how and why she went about exploring the countryside in its most quintessentially English weather.
Whenever rain falls, our countryside changes. Fields, farms, hills and hedgerows appear altered, the wildlife behaves differently, and over time the terrain itself is transformed.
In 'Rain', Melissa Harrison explores our relationship with the weather as she follows the course of four rain showers, in four seasons, across Wicken Fen, Shropshire, the Darent Valley and Dartmoor.
Blending these expeditions with reading, research, memory and imagination, she reveals how rain is not just an essential element of the world around us, but a key part of our own identity too.
'Rain is that rare and delightful thing, nature writing that entertains as it informs.' Tristan Gooley, author of 'The Walker's Guide to Outdoor Clues and Signs'
'Wonderful.' James Rebanks, author of 'The Shepherd's Life'
As her first two poetry collections - 'Night Photograph' and 'A World Where News Travelled Slowly' - are reissued, the acclaimed poet Lavinia Greenlaw reflects on her earliest experiences of writing poetry - and considers how she has developed as a writer since then.
Listen to Edward Dusinberre, first violinist for the Takács Quartet, discuss his new book 'Beethoven for a Later Age', which gives new insight into the life of a classical music performer, as well as the workings of one of the world's most famous string quartets.
1956 was a year of of exhilarating triumphs and shattering defeats around the world. Here historian Simon Hall discusses the year and his book 1956: The World in Revolt.
Popular uprisings in Poland and Hungary shake Moscow's hold on its eastern European empire. Across the American South, and in the Union of South Africa, black people risk their livelihoods, and their lives, in the struggle to dismantle institutionalised white supremacy and secure first-class citizenship. France and Britain, already battling anti-colonial insurgencies in Algeria and Cyprus, now face the humiliation of Suez. Meanwhile, in Cuba, Fidel Castro and his band of rebels take to the Sierra Maestra to plot the overthrow of a dictator...
1956 was one of the most remarkable years of the twentieth century. All across the globe, ordinary people spoke out, filled the streets and city squares, and took up arms in an attempt to win their freedom.
In response to these unprecedented challenges to their authority, those in power fought back, in a desperate bid to shore up their position. It was an epic contest, and one which made 1956 - like 1789 and 1848 - a year that changed our world.
Faber New Poets 10 is Will Burns's debut poetry pamphlet, as part of an innovative publishing programme supporting the best in the next generation of poets, from Faber & Faber in partnership with Arts Council England. Here he reads Transmission from the collection.
Faber New Poets 10 is Will Burns's debut poetry pamphlet, as part of an innovative publishing programme supporting the best in the next generation of poets, from Faber & Faber in partnership with Arts Council England. Here he reads In the Bar at the Golden Heart Hotel from the collection.
Faber New Poets 12 is Declan Ryan's debut poetry pamphlet, as part of an innovative publishing programme supporting the best in the next generation of poets, from Faber & Faber in partnership with Arts Council England. Here he reads Ethiopia Shall Stretch Forth Her Hands.
Faber New Poets 12 is Declan Ryan's debut poetry pamphlet, as part of an innovative publishing programme supporting the best in the next generation of poets, from Faber & Faber in partnership with Arts Council England. Here he reads When We Were Kings.
Faber New Poets 10 is Will Burns's debut poetry pamphlet, as part of an innovative publishing programme supporting the best in the next generation of poets, from Faber & Faber in partnership with Arts Council England. Here he reads Guy from the collection.
1606 was the year William Shakespeare wrote King Lear, Macbeth and Antony and Cleopatra. It was also the year that plague returned to London, and King James wanted to turn England and Scotland into a united Britain. And the aftermath of the Gunpowder Plot brings it shockingly close to Shakespeare's door.
Ten years ago James Shapiro won the Samuel Johnson Prize for his bestseller 1599: A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare. Now, to mark the forthcoming 400th anniversary of Shakespeare's death, comes a compelling look at a no less extraordinary year in his life: 1606.
http://www.faber.co.uk/9780571235780-1606.html
Three interlocking worlds. Four people looking for answers. But who controls the future – or the past?
Bestselling novelist Iain Pears discusses his new work ARCADIA, to be read as an app, written using specially-commissioned software and developed for readers by Touchpress and Faber, the partners behind multi-award-winning apps including The Waste Land and Shakespeare’s Sonnets for iPad. It will be released as a free app with in-app purchase on the App Store for iPhone and iPad at the end of August, prior to the novel’s UK hardback publication on 3 September 2015.
www.appstore.com/arcadiabyiainpears
Brian Cathcart's book The News from Waterloo tells the incredible story of how the story of Wellington's victory took 3 days to reach England. In this audio specially recorded for the book Hugh Grant reads Wellington's famous dispatch which told the world of the victory.
The poems in David Harsent's new collection Fire Songs (winner of the 2014 T. S. Eliot Prize for Poetry), whether single poems, dramatic sequences, or poems that 'belong to one another', share a dark territory and a sometimes haunting, sometimes steely, lyrical tone.
The poems in David Harsent's new collection Fire Songs (winner of the 2014 T. S. Eliot Prize for Poetry), whether single poems, dramatic sequences, or poems that 'belong to one another', share a dark territory and a sometimes haunting, sometimes steely, lyrical tone.
The poems in David Harsent's new collection Fire Songs (winner of the 2014 T. S. Eliot Prize for Poetry), whether single poems, dramatic sequences, or poems that 'belong to one another', share a dark territory and a sometimes haunting, sometimes steely, lyrical tone.
The poems in David Harsent's new collection Fire Songs (winner of the 2014 T. S. Eliot Prize for Poetry), whether single poems, dramatic sequences, or poems that 'belong to one another', share a dark territory and a sometimes haunting, sometimes steely, lyrical tone. Here is David Harsent reading one of the poems from the collection, 'Armistice.'
The poems in David Harsent's new collection Fire Songs (winner of the 2014 T. S. Eliot Prize for Poetry), whether single poems, dramatic sequences, or poems that 'belong to one another', share a dark territory and a sometimes haunting, sometimes steely, lyrical tone.
Here's David Harsent reading 'M. A. D. 1971', which can be found towards the end of the collection.
The poems in David Harsent's new collection Fire Songs (winner of the 2014 T. S. Eliot Prize for Poetry), whether single poems, dramatic sequences, or poems that 'belong to one another', share a dark territory and a sometimes haunting, sometimes steely, lyrical tone.
Here is David Harsent reading the opening poem from the collection - 'Fire: a song for Mistress Askew'.
In this edition of the Faber Podcast we talk to Australian novelist and long-time New York resident Peter Carey. His new book Amnesia is the story of a young female hacker - Gaby - whose Angel Worm virus creates havoc in the Australian prison system, and consequently also in the US, making her Public Enemy Number One. This 30-minute interview covers everything from US/Australian relations (especially post-1975 and America's role in the removal of the Gough Whitlam government), new forms of protest, activism and hacking, and those rumours that Carey was asked to ghost-write the Julian Assange story.
Jenny Uglow is the acclaimed author of many great works of history. Her new book, In These Times, tells the story of what happened in Britain during the Napoleonic wars. In this podcast she talks about her inspiration, and some of the many remarkable stories she uncovered along the way.
We know the thrilling, terrible stories of the battles of the Napoleonic wars - but what of those left behind? The people on a Norfolk farm, in a Yorkshire mill, a Welsh iron foundry, an Irish village, a London bank or a Scottish mountain? The aristocrats and paupers, old and young, butchers and bakers and candlestick makers - how did the war touch their lives?
Jenny Uglow, the prize-winning author of The Lunar Men and Nature's Engraver, follows the gripping back-and-forth of the first global war, but turns the news upside down, seeing how it reached the people. Illustrated by the satires of Gillray, Rowlandson and the paintings of Turner and Constable, and combining the familiar voices of Jane Austen, Wordsworth, Scott and Byron with others lost in the crowd, In These Times delves into the archives to tell the moving story of how people lived and loved and sang and wrote, struggling through hard times and opening new horizons that would change their country for a century ahead.
This is the story of Joan of Arc as you have never heard it before, told by Helen Castor, author of the acclaimed bestseller and BBC documentary series She-Wolves. Instead of the icon, she gives us a living, breathing young woman; a roaring girl fighting the English, and taking sides in a bloody civil war that was tearing fifteenth-century France apart. In this podcast interview she discusses how she came to write the book, and her attempt to retell the story stripped of the myths and legends.
In Helen Castor's book she gives us a portrait of a 19-year-old peasant who hears voices from God; a teenager transformed into a warrior leading an army to victory, in an age that believed women should not fight. And it is also the story behind the myth we all know, a myth which began to take hold at her trial: that of the Maid of Orleans, the saviour of France, a young woman burned at the stake as a heretic, a woman who five hundred years later would be declared a saint.
Joan and her world are brought vividly to life in Helen Castor's refreshing new take on the medieval world.
In this two-part Faber Podcast we talk to David Harsent whose eleventh poetry collection 'Fire Songs' was published in August. Writing about his previous collection, 'Night', Fiona Sampson in the Independent wrote: ‘Truly significant poets write like no one else, and David Harsent is both sui generis, and unsurpassed.’ Part one of this interview focused on the themes of Fire, War and its aftermath, and the Rat, an ineradicable creature that occupies the margins of our dreams. In part two Harsent discusses his experience of living with tinnitus, and concludes with a discussion of religion, in particular the disquieting figure of trickster Christ. Part two also includes a complete reading of the first of the 'Fire Songs'.
In this two-part Faber Podcast we talk to David Harsent about his eleventh poetry collection 'Fire Songs'. The poems in 'Fire Songs' are full of haunting imagery and writing of sheer visceral power, and part one of the interview focuses on the themes of Fire, War and its aftermath, and the Rat – an ineradicable creature, ‘survivor of Fire and Flood’ that remains unscathed after the Apocalypse with designs on inheriting the Earth. In part two Harsent discusses poems written in response to his experience of living with tinnitus, and concludes with a discussion of religion, in particular the disquieting figure of trickster Christ. Part two also has a complete reading of the first of the 'Fire Songs'.
Our latest Faber Podcast is about a building – The Old Vic theatre on London’s South Bank, and the subject of a new book by journalist and writer Terry Coleman, whose many previous books include the authorised life of Laurence Olivier. Dating back almost two centuries the Old Vic is an institution that holds a place in national cultural life with few rivals – all the more surprising when you bear in mind it’s not a state-funded enterprise. The Old Vic has had to forge its own identity over the years, and the story Terry tells is full of highs and lows, triumphs and disasters, characters much larger than life – on and off-stage. ‘Theatre thrives on legends,’ he writes, and that is abundantly so in the case of the Old Vic.
'Six Poets: Hardy to Larkin' presents Alan Bennett's selection of English verse by his favourite poets, accompanied by his own enlivening commentary.
Read more about 'Six Poets' on the Faber website: bit.ly/1wQCx3i Audiobook also available: amzn.to/1qNzFyX
'Six Poets: Hardy to Larkin' presents Alan Bennett's selection of English verse by his favourite poets, accompanied by his own enlivening commentary.
Read more about 'Six Poets' on the Faber website: bit.ly/1wQCx3i Audiobook also available: amzn.to/1qNzFyX
'Six Poets: Hardy to Larkin' presents Alan Bennett's selection of English verse by his favourite poets, accompanied by his own enlivening commentary.
Read more about 'Six Poets' on the Faber website: http://bit.ly/1wQCx3i Audiobook also available: http://amzn.to/1qNzFyX
Welcome to the first of three podcasts from Faber this Autumn focusing on major new works of history. In the next two months we'll hear from Helen Castor and Jenny Uglow but today we're in conversation with Dan Jones, who completes a three-volume study of medieval Britain with The Hollow Crown, in which he charts the turbulent downfall of the Plantagenets and the rise of the Tudors. As Dan says himself, it's a story that's 'big, bloody and thrilling'.
John Lanchester's previous book on money and banking - the bestselling 'Whoops!' - was described by Will Self as 'the routemap to the crazed world of contemporary finance we've all been waiting for'. If 'Whoops!' was the routemap, then his new book, 'How to Speak Money' is the phrasebook. It shows you it's possible to learn to speak the language of money - possible, desirable and perhaps even necessary if we're to avoid feelings of complete helplessness and bafflement when confronted with the big financial forces that shape our lives.
Eimear McBride reads the audibook of A Girl is a Half-formed Thing, available now through Audible - http://www.audible.co.uk/pd/Fiction/A-Girl-Is-a-Half-Formed-Thing-Audiobook/B00MBV8FSA/ref=a_search_c4_1_1_srImg?qid=1407254527&sr=1-1
A Girl Is a Half-formed Thing is an unforgettable novel from a major new literary talent. Eimear McBride's award-winning debut novel tells the story of a young woman's relationship with her brother, and the long shadow cast by his childhood brain tumour. It is a shocking and intimate insight into the thoughts, feelings and chaotic sexuality of a vulnerable and isolated protagonist. The author's spellbinding reading illuminates every nuance of the text with feeling and sympathy. The listener enters the narrator's head, experiencing her world at first hand. This isn't always comfortable - but it is always a revelation.
Leading international economist Gerard Lyons spent nearly thirty years working in the City and is now Chief Economic Advisor to the Mayor of London, Boris Johnson. In 2010 and 2011 Bloomberg ranked him the number one global forecaster out of 400 leading economists, so his views on where we are heading economically are worth listening to. In his new book The Consolations of Economics he lays out his roadmap for an optimistic future. Hear what he has to say in a Faber Podcast recorded at City Hall, with the skyscrapers of the City the ideal backdrop.
Roderick Bailey was able to draw on long-classified documents for his dazzling recreation of the cloak-and-dagger war fought by British secret agents in the Special Operations Executive (SOE) against Mussolini's Fascist Italy during the Second World War, which climaxed in one of the most extraordinary episodes of the whole conflict. Now stationed as a historian at the University of Oxford, Bailey was commissioned by the Cabinet Office to pen the official history of the war waged by the SOE. His account is incredibly pacy and readable, telling the story from both sides and recounting exploits so daring and implausible (for example, a little-known plot to assassinate Il Duce in 1942) that - if this were fiction - they would be dismissed as implausible. Here is the author speaking to the Faber Podcast.
Akhil Sharma was born in New Delhi and emigrated to the US in the late 1970s. Having initially pursued a career in investment banking he came to prominence as a writer in 2001 with his debut novel, An Obedient Father, which won the Hemingway/PEN Award. And in 2007 he was named as one of Granta's Best of Young American Novelists. So expectations for what Akhil would do next have been high for some time. Family Life, mirroring events in Akhil's own life - his brother suffered a severe head injury and was left brain-damaged - has been a dozen years in the writing, has undergone many drafts and considerable pruning. But it's now with us and being rapturously received on both sides of the Atlantic.
Count Arthur Strong is a show business legend, after-dinner speaker and a leading authority on Ancient Egypt, having been stationed there during his nation service. He has countless friends in the showbiz world. People like Barry Cryer, the white haired one with glasses off 'I'm Sorry I Haven't Got A Clue' and 'Jokers Wild'. This is his first volume, of what he believes may be a six-volume collection, of his memoirs and it's available to buy now from Audible: http://bit.ly/1iSoNgT.
The audio version, read by the great man himself, is available now on CD and digital download.
Set in 18th-century London, Maria McCann’s third novel Ace, King, Knave has everything you’d want in a work of historical fiction, and more. Everything from gin and gambling, to the harsh realities of Georgian life, including the burden of disease (which cared little for class or status), the levels of extreme poverty and the plight of women. We first spoke to Maria on the Faber Podcast in 2010 when she published The Wilding. Her new novel, Ace, King, Knave, finds her making a radical move for a historical novelist - switching centuries - and that is one of many topics up for discussion here.
In the first part of our extensive interview with film-maker and Britten expert John Bridcut we covered his fascination with Britten and his companion to his life and works, Essential Britten. John's other book - Britten's Children - is central to this second instalment, and covers a subject little discussed until Bridcut himself produced a television documentary about it a decade ago - the composer's liking for young adolescents, and the extent to which this did or didn't influence his work.
Benjamin Britten's association with Faber is a long one, dating back to 1964 to the creation of Faber Music, one of whose express aims was to publish the composer's music. Over the decades Faber has published many books on Britten, including multiple volumes of Letters, the still-controversial 1992 biography by Humphrey Carpenter, and two books by John Bridcut - Britten's Children (2006) and Essential Britten (2012). Bridcut is one of the contributors to our series of podcasts marking the centenary of Britten's birth and in this, the first part of two, he talks about his own reaction to Britten as composer and conductor, and also tells us more about his book, Essential Britten.
As part of our series of podcasts to commemorate the centenary of the birth of Benjamin Britten - the nation's greatest 20th-century composer - we had the pleasure of speaking to Colin Matthews. As an employee of Faber Music, Matthews assisted Britten with several of his late scores, in particular Britten's final opera, Death in Venice. He has since become a distinguished composer in his own right, and is also Chairman of the Britten Estate.
Distinguished writer, essayist and anthologist Ronald Blythe is best-known for his classic portrayal of 1960s Suffolk village life, Akenfield. This year sees publication of a new memoir, The Time by the Sea, in which he remembers life in the mid-1950s and the early years of the Aldeburgh Festival, with a social scene dominated by the likes of Benjamin Britten, Peter Pears, Imogen Holst, John and Christine Nash and many other artists, writers and musicians. Blythe recounts also his discoveries - in the arts, botany, and the history and geography of his native county. It's a wonderfully nostalgic interview recalling a bygone era, recorded in the seclusion of Blythe's remote home on the Essex/Suffolk border.
The Time by the Sea is a new memoir by distinguished writer, essayist and anthologist Ronald Blythe, best-known as the author of Akenfield: A Portrait of an English Village. In The Time by the Sea he recalls a bygone era - life in 1950s Suffolk and the milieu surrounding the Aldeburgh Festival. He remembers great friendships with the likes of John and Christine Nash, Imogen Holst and Cedric Morris, being a part of Benjamin Britten's circle, and discoveries - in the arts, botany, and the history and geography of his native county, Suffolk. This reading was recorded to accompany an interview for the Faber Podcast.
After concluding his Britten interviews, George Miller had one final, burning Britten-related question, which he put to Colin Matthews. It was about a musical sign that Britten had invented and named after that quintessential East Anglian wading bird, the curlew …
The premise of the fifth of our Benjamin Britten centenary podcasts is a simple one - we ask our contributors (John Bridcut, Colin Matthews and Dobrinka Tabakova) if they could take just one work by Britten to a desert island, what would it be? Given the extensive breadth of Britten's catalogue, this is easier said than done ...
In the fourth of our special podcasts to mark the centenary of the birth of Benjamin Britten, we examine the great British composer's musical legacy - his music, the recordings, his place in the concert hall, and his influence on a younger generation of composers. John Bridcut talks us through the process of rating all of Britten's works for his book 'Essential Britten', and how he used a star-rating system. Colin Matthews, who worked alongside Britten, remembers his sheer professionalism, whilst Dobrinka Tabakova, a representative of younger composers, shares her appreciation of Britten's passion for people and his consideration of the human condition.
Graham Farmelo first appeared on the Faber Podcast in 2009 to tell us about his book on physicist Paul Dirac, The Strangest Man, which went on to earn the author the Costa Biography Award. He’s back to discuss his new book, Churchill’s Bomb, a fascinating and pacy story of how Britain became a nuclear power, seen through the lens of Winston Churchill’s career. Churchill, as we learn, always had an interest in science. He was a devoted reader of H. G. Wells, and Churchill himself pondered the nuclear question in his writing. In 1937 he contemplated the destructive potential that science’s mastery of nature held out – at a time when many scientists still doubted a nuclear bomb was achievable – and asked, ‘Are we fit for it?’ The book is also a story of how the centre of nuclear physics shifted from Britain to the USA, and the coming into being of post-war geopolitics in which nuclear capability would loom so large. (www.faber.co.uk/churchillsbomb)
The third programme in our series of Britten podcasts looks at perhaps the most controversial aspect of Britten’s biography – the sequence of relationships he had throughout his life with adolescent boys. The principal guest in this instalment is John Bridcut, who produced a documentary and subsequently wrote a book entitled ‘Britten’s Children’. Also featuring here is Colin Matthews who tells us about the reservations he had with Britten’s score for ‘Death in Venice’, some of them to do with its seemingly overt autobiographical character.
In the second of our specially commissioned podcasts to mark the centenary of the birth of Benjamin Britten, we look at some of the evidence that later writers and musicians have to work with when they come to assess Britten the musician and the man. He was a notorious hoarder - tens of thousands of letters, manuscripts, draft manuscripts, annotated scores. He seldom tore things up and proved to be a brilliant archivist. Contributing to this podcast are author and film-maker John Bridcut and composer Colin Matthews.
In this series of podcasts to mark the centenary of Benjamin Britten our interviewer George Miller speaks with a number of people who knew Britten, or who have written about him, or been captivated and inspired by his music from across several generations. In the first episode (of six) we focus on first encounters. Joining us in conversation are composers Colin Matthews and Dobrinka Tabakova, author and film-maker John Bridcut, and Akenfield author Ronald Blythe, whose new book recalling his and Britten’s days in Aldeburgh – The Time by the Sea – was published earlier in 2013. (http://www.faber.co.uk/brittenbooks/)
Costa Award-winning poet Christopher Reid's CV includes the roles of anthologist, editor, publisher and even academic so there are few people better-placed to turn their satirical eye on the world of contemporary poetry - its ambitions, vanities and rivalries. His new book 'Six Bad Poets' charts the criss-crossing fates of six protagonists, all trying to make, cling on to, or re-establish their reputations on London's literary scene. Reid tells their tale in six parts - each of six sestinas - itself a six-times-six verse form. Charles Prime, Antonia Candling, Jonathan Wilderness, Derek Dufton, Jane Steep and Bryony Butters - six recognisable character types, all exhibiting signs of recklessness and fecklessness, finding themselves in exquisitely awkward situations that Reid works into a highly enjoyable farce-in-verse. Part two of this extended interview can be found here: http://snd.sc/1hYHBdd.
In this extended interview with poet Christopher Reid (recorded alongside a podcast featuring his new book 'Six Bad Poets') we discuss the many aspects of a varied career: Reid's early association with the 'Martian' school of writing (notable for its use of surprising visual imagery); his eight years as Poetry Editor at Faber, at the helm of a list featuring the likes of Hughes, Heaney and Muldoon and an emerging new generation of talented new writers; and finally his moving sequence of poems - 'A Scattering' - written in memory of his late wife Lucinda, and winner of the Costa Book of the Year Award. Interspersed in the conversation are readings of verse from his 'Selected Poems'. This is a fantastic insight into the life of someone at the very heart of British poetry, and should be of great interest to anyone involved - whether fledgling poet or experienced editor - in poetry publishing today. Part one of this extended interview can be found here: http://snd.sc/174uzvl.
'A Scattering' is the title poem from Christopher Reid's Costa Book award-winning collection of the same name. It's also included in Reid's Selected Poems, which is an essential introduction to the work of a richly resourceful poet engaged in what he himself once described as 'provisional negotiations with untidy life'.
Award-winning theatre director Michael Blakemore arrived in the UK from Australia in 1950. Following 15 years as an actor he moved into directing, scoring his first major hit with A Day in the Death of Joe Egg. Many successes have followed: productions of classics, new plays from the likes of Hare and Mamet, and a successful partnership with Michael Frayn. His new book Stage Blood describes Blakemore's five years at the National Theatre in the 1970s: more successes alongside years of turbulence, as Olivier's time as Artistic Director came to an end to be replaced by the controversial Peter Hall. An era of big personalities and questions asked around the need for subsidised theatre - questions which remain relevant today.
John Lloyd recorded at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe 2013, from his show Liff of QI, talking about his and Douglas Adams's 1983 book The Meaning of Liff and the new sequel Afterliff written with Jon Canter. http://afterliff.com
John Lloyd recorded at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe 2013, from his show Liff of QI, talking about his and Douglas Adams's 1983 book The Meaning of Liff and the new sequel Afterliff written with Jon Canter. http://afterliff.com
John Lloyd recorded at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe 2013, from his show Liff of QI, talking about his and Douglas Adams's 1983 book The Meaning of Liff and the new sequel Afterliff written with Jon Canter. http://afterliff.com
John Lloyd recorded at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe 2013, from his show Liff of QI, talking about his and Douglas Adams's 1983 book The Meaning of Liff and the new sequel Afterliff written with Jon Canter. http://afterliff.com
John Lloyd recorded at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe 2013, from his show Liff of QI, talking about his and Douglas Adams's 1983 book The Meaning of Liff and the new sequel Afterliff written with Jon Canter. http://afterliff.com
John Lloyd recorded at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe 2013, from his show Liff of QI, talking about his and Douglas Adams's 1983 book The Meaning of Liff and the new sequel Afterliff written with Jon Canter. http://afterliff.com/
John Lloyd recorded at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe 2013, from his show Liff of QI, talking about his and Douglas Adams's 1983 book The Meaning of Liff and the new sequel Afterliff written with Jon Canter. http://afterliff.com
John Lloyd recorded at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe 2013, from his show Liff of QI, talking about his and Douglas Adams's 1983 book The Meaning of Liff and the new sequel Afterliff written with Jon Canter. http://afterliff.com
John Lloyd recorded at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe 2013, from his show Liff of QI, talking about his and Douglas Adams's 1983 book The Meaning of Liff and the new sequel Afterliff written with Jon Canter. http://afterliff.com
Dear Boy is the dramatic and inventive debut by Emily Berry. These characterful, intelligent and darkly witty poems explore lives lived strangely in unusual worlds, through a series of deft and seductive soliloquies. To accompany a Faber Poetry Podcast Emily reads a selection of poems, including 'Tomato Salad'.
Dear Boy is the dramatic and inventive debut by Emily Berry. These characterful, intelligent and darkly witty poems explore lives lived strangely in unusual worlds, through a series of deft and seductive soliloquies. To accompany a Faber Poetry Podcast Emily reads a selection of poems, including 'The Old Fuel'.
Dear Boy is the dramatic and inventive debut by Emily Berry. These characterful, intelligent and darkly witty poems explore lives lived strangely in unusual worlds, through a series of deft and seductive soliloquies. To accompany a Faber Poetry Podcast Emily reads a selection of poems, including 'Sweet Arlene'.
Dear Boy is the dramatic and inventive debut by Emily Berry. These characterful, intelligent and darkly witty poems explore lives lived strangely in unusual worlds, through a series of deft and seductive soliloquies. To accompany a Faber Poetry Podcast Emily reads a selection of poems, including 'Some Fears'.
Dear Boy is the dramatic and inventive debut by Emily Berry. These characterful, intelligent and darkly witty poems explore lives lived strangely in unusual worlds, through a series of deft and seductive soliloquies. To accompany a Faber Poetry Podcast Emily reads a selection of poems, including 'A Short Guide to Corseting'.
Dear Boy is the dramatic and inventive debut by Emily Berry. These characterful, intelligent and darkly witty poems explore lives lived strangely in unusual worlds, through a series of deft and seductive soliloquies. To accompany a Faber Poetry Podcast Emily reads a selection of poems, including 'Nothing Sets My Heart Aflame'.
Dear Boy is the dramatic and inventive debut by Emily Berry. These characterful, intelligent and darkly witty poems explore lives lived strangely in unusual worlds, through a series of deft and seductive soliloquies. To accompany a Faber Poetry Podcast Emily reads a selection of poems, including 'Letter to Husband'.
Reviewing the Forward Prize-shortlisted Dear Boy in the Observer, Kate Kellaway wrote, 'Emily Berry's debut is a treat. She is a new yet anything but hesitant voice. What is stimulating is that she approaches poetry as a flexible, permissive, dynamic ally. She seems to have complete freedom with form, and will use a poem whenever helpful as a vehicle for escape. A getaway car ... Berry's range is amazing.' In our latest Faber Poetry Podcast, Emily Berry reads a number of the poems, and tells us more about them along the way.
In Times of Fading Light is Eugen Ruge's 2011 German Book Prize-winning debut novel. A multi-generational story spanning well over half a century (and drawing to a certain extent on Ruge's own family history), it charts the impact of wider historical events on the lives of the Umlitzer family, who once belonged to the Communist elite but whose socialist utopia has long-since vanished by the time the book opens in 2001. Through four generations Ruge presents different perspectives of life under different political regimes and the restrictions they imposed - we move from Fascism, to Communism and post-Communism, finishing with hyper-Capitalism. We witness characters' lives that still have their fair share of mundane chores, problems and domestic disputes, but which appear extraordinary set against backdrops that are hard now to imagine.
In Times of Fading Light begins in 2001 as Alexander Umnitzer, who has just been diagnosed with terminal cancer, leaves behind his ailing father to fly to Mexico, where his grandparents lived as exiles in the 1940s. The novel then takes us both forward and back in time, creating a panoramic view of the family's history: from Alexander's grandparents' return to the GDR to build the socialist state to his father's decade spent in a Gulag for criticising the Soviet regime to his son's desire to leave the political struggles of the twentieth century in the past. To accompany Eugen's interview for the Faber Podcast, here is the second of two readings from the book.
In Times of Fading Light begins in 2001 as Alexander Umnitzer, who has just been diagnosed with terminal cancer, leaves behind his ailing father to fly to Mexico, where his grandparents lived as exiles in the 1940s. The novel then takes us both forward and back in time, creating a panoramic view of the family's history: from Alexander's grandparents' return to the GDR to build the socialist state to his father's decade spent in a Gulag for criticising the Soviet regime to his son's desire to leave the political struggles of the twentieth century in the past. To accompany Eugen's interview for the Faber Podcast, here is the first of two readings from the book.
Set in a world that Barbara Kingsolver knows well - rural Tennessee - Flight Behaviour follows events in the life of Dellarobia Turnbow, a woman in her late twenties who married the wrong man too young, and who gave up her own plans on becoming pregnant aged 17. One day, on the way to her first tryst with a lover, she has an encounter which at first she can't explain - millions of monarch butterflies that have been thrown off course by the effects of climate change, setting the forest aglow like a living sea of fire. The changes that the butterflies bring to Dellarobia's life - her awakening to what is at stake and how she can channel her own flight behaviour - are at the core of this beautifully written novel, which is informed of course by Kingsolver's own knowledge and experience as a biologist and conservationist.
Set in a world that Barbara Kingsolver knows well - rural Tennessee - Flight Behaviour follows events in the life of Dellarobia Turnbow, a woman in her late twenties who married the wrong man too young, and who gave up her own plans on becoming pregnant aged 17. One day, on the way to her first tryst with a lover, she has an encounter which at first she can't explain - millions of monarch butterflies that have been thrown off course by the effects of climate change, setting the forest aglow like a living sea of fire. The changes that the butterflies bring to Dellarobia's life - her awakening to what is at stake and how she can channel her own flight behaviour - are at the core of this beautifully written novel, which is informed of course by Kingsolver's own knowledge and experience as a biologist and environmentalist. Here is a short extract from the book, read by the author.
Marcel Theroux's new novel Strange Bodies takes the reader on a dizzying speculative journey that poses questions about identity, translation, consciousness, metamorphosis, technology, necromancy, resurrection, immortality, not to mention Frankenstein, Ray Kurzweil and some of Communist Russia's most prominent thinkers. The book fizzes with ideas, but ultimately leaves you pondering just what it is to be human. Here is Marcel Theroux in conversation with Faber Podcast host George Miller.
Nicholas Slopen has been dead for months. So when a man claiming to be Nicholas turns up to visit an old girlfriend, deception seems the only possible motive ... Here's Marcel Theroux reading the second of two extracts from Strange Bodies, a literary sci-fi thriller fizzing with ideas about everything from consciousness to resurrection. An interview with Marcel is also available.
Nicholas Slopen has been dead for months. So when a man claiming to be Nicholas turns up to visit an old girlfriend, deception seems the only possible motive ... Here's Marcel Theroux reading the first of two extracts from Strange Bodies, a literary sci-fi thriller fizzing with ideas about everything from consciousness to resurrection. An interview with Marcel is also available.
Louise Doughty was a guest on the Faber Podcast in 2010, when she discussed Whatever You Love. Her new novel, Apple Tree Yard, shares with its predecessor an interest in the working out of vengeance, but in an entirely different context. Yvonne Carmichael is a loyal wife, a good mother, and a successful geneticist but one poor decision - the wrong time, in the wrong place, with the wrong man - sees her life spiral out of control, climaxing in a murder trial at the Old Bailey. It's an intriguing narrative and here Louise Doughty tells us more, talking us through not just the novel but the many ideas contained within, including prejudice and sexual politics, the criminal justice system, and even the erotic potential of the Houses of Parliament.
Sometimes you find yourself in the wrong place, at the wrong time, with the wrong person ... Louise Doughty’s seventh novel Apple Tree Yard tells the story of a woman who makes one rash choice that ends up putting her on trial at the Old Bailey for the most serious of crimes. But what is that choice, and what has a place on the map in central London called ‘Apple Tree Yard’ got to do with it? Here's the author reading the second of two extracts.
Sometimes you find yourself in the wrong place, at the wrong time, with the wrong person ... Louise Doughty’s seventh novel Apple Tree Yard tells the story of a woman who makes one rash choice that ends up putting her on trial at the Old Bailey for the most serious of crimes. But what is that choice, and what has a place on the map in central London called ‘Apple Tree Yard’ got to do with it? Here's the author reading the first of two extracts.
The gun in the title of Emma Brockes' extraordinary memoir belonged to her mother Paula, who left South Africa as a young woman in the 1960s to build a new life for herself in England, away from the trauma of her earlier years. 'One day I will tell you the story of my life', she promised her ten-year-old daughter, 'and you will be amazed'. She didn't reveal details during her lifetime, but something piqued her journalist daughter's curiosity. Tracking down relatives on a different continent, some more reticent than others, Emma Brockes unravels an astonishing story of murder, molestation and abuse. Yet the book is far from misery memoir, packed as it is with quirky stories and tales of amazing resilience.
This is the second of two extracts from the book read by the author.
The gun in the title of Emma Brockes' extraordinary memoir belonged to her mother Paula, who left South Africa as a young woman in the 1960s to build a new life for herself in England, away from the trauma of her earlier years. 'One day I will tell you the story of my life', she promised her ten-year-old daughter, 'and you will be amazed'. She didn't reveal details during her lifetime, but something piqued her journalist daughter's curiosity. Tracking down relatives on a different continent, some more reticent than others, Emma Brockes unravels an astonishing story of murder, molestation and abuse. Yet the book is far from misery memoir, packed as it is with quirky stories and tales of amazing resilience.
This is the first of two extracts from the book read by the author.
The gun in the title of Emma Brockes' extraordinary memoir belonged to her mother Paula, who left South Africa as a young woman in the 1960s to build a new life for herself in England, away from the trauma of her earlier years. 'One day I will tell you the story of my life', she promised her ten-year-old daughter, 'and you will be amazed'. She didn't reveal details during her lifetime, but something piqued her journalist daughter's curiosity. Tracking down relatives on a different continent, some more reticent than others, Emma Brockes unravels an astonishing story of murder, molestation and abuse. Yet the book is far from misery memoir, packed as it is with quirky stories and tales of amazing resilience.
Nadeem Aslam, author of Maps for Lost Lovers and The Wasted Vigil, spoke to the Faber Podcast recently about his new novel The Blind Man's Garden, set in contemporary Afghanistan on the verge of war in the wake of 9/11. Nadeem also read three extracts from the book, which you can listen to here.
Nadeem Aslam, author of Maps for Lost Lovers and The Wasted Vigil, spoke to the Faber Podcast recently about his new novel The Blind Man's Garden, set in contemporary Afghanistan on the verge of war in the wake of 9/11. Nadeem also read three extracts from the book, which you can listen to here.
Nadeem Aslam, author of Maps for Lost Lovers and The Wasted Vigil, spoke to the Faber Podcast recently about his new novel The Blind Man's Garden, set in contemporary Afghanistan on the verge of war in the wake of 9/11. Nadeem also read three extracts from the book, which you can listen to here.
Like Nadeem Aslam's previous novel The Wasted Vigil, The Blind Man's Garden is set in Pakistan and Afghanistan in the wake of 9/11. But whereas its predecessor focused on foreign characters who came to Afghanistan from other nations, in the new book Aslam explores how a group of Pakistani characters experience the onset of the war on terror. The conflict is never far away in one of the most rapturously received novels so far this year.
A wonderful reading from poet Alice Oswald at Faber Social's evening celebrating Nature Writing. Recorded at The Social, London on 2 July, 2012. Find out more about Faber Social events at www.faber.co.uk/events/social.
The first of two readings from Neil McKenna's colourful account of the lives of Fanny and Stella, two effeminate cross-dressing young men who shocked Victorian England with their antics.
The first of two readings from Neil McKenna's colourful account of the lives of Fanny and Stella, two effeminate cross-dressing young men who shocked Victorian England with their antics.
Neil McKenna's rollicking and extremely colourful 'Fanny and Stella' is an account of the lives and loves of two effeminate cross-dressing young men whom Victorian society found every bit as shocking as Oscar Wilde (the subject of the author's previous award-winning biography). Like Wilde, Fanny and Stella found themselves on trial for the way they lived and, McKenna argues, like Wilde's trial a quarter of a century later, the trial of Fanny and Stella was a landmark in terms of attitudes to gender, sexuality and identity.
David Peace is the bestselling author of 'The Damned Utd', 'The Red Riding Quartet' and 'GB84'. Here he reads an extract from his upcoming novel 'Red or Dead' (publishing in August 2013), which tells the story of Bill Shankly, perhaps the first truly great football manager of the modern age. Find out more about the book at http://faber.co.uk/redordead
The third of three extracts from Francis Spufford's Red Plenty, a book that's very hard to pin down - it's fictionalised non-fiction in which some of its characters are real, others invented. Read here by the author.
The second of three extracts from Francis Spufford's Red Plenty, a book that's very hard to pin down - it's fictionalised non-fiction in which some of its characters are real, others invented. Read here by the author.
The first of three extracts from Francis Spufford's Red Plenty, a book that's very hard to pin down - it's fictionalised non-fiction in which some of its characters are real, others invented. Read here by the author.
Orhan Pamuk was our first ever interviewee for the Faber Podcast, back in 2007 shortly after he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. He returns to talk to us about Silent House, a novel first published in Turkish some three decades ago, but only now available in English. The book - a family's story told by multiple narrators each with their own viewpoint - is set in the summer before the 1980 military coup in Turkey - a country divided in which political tensions spill over onto the streets on a daily basis.
Jilted on her wedding day at the last moment, still wearing her dress years later, among the ruins of her wedding breakfast ... But how did someone born into privilege, who seemed to have everything going for her, end up in such a desperate state of spinsterhood? In his new novel 'Havisham' Ronald Frame (who Alexander McCall Smith has called 'Scotland's finest contemporary writer') imagines the earlier life story of one of Dickens' best-known characters, Miss Catherine Havisham. Ronald Frame tells us more about it on the Faber Podcast.
'This has been the story of your life ... Whenever you come to a fork in the road, your body breaks down, for your body has always known what your mind doesn’t know … your body has always borne the brunt of your fears and inner battles.' Thirty years after The Invention of Solitude, Paul Auster returns to memoir - though he says he prefers to think of the book as a collection of autobiographical fragments. Here is the Brooklyn author reading an extract.
Paul Auster may be best known for his novels - among them The New York Trilogy, The Brooklyn Follies, The Music of Chance and The Book of Illusions - but he first won acclaim with a memoir, his debut work The Invention of Solitude, which he wrote in the aftermath of his father’s sudden death. Now, thirty years later, Auster returns to memoir - though he says he prefers to think of the book as a collection of autobiographical fragments - with his latest book Winter Journal.
The publication of Edna O'Brien's memoir is one of the major literary events of 2012 Born in Ireland in 1930 and driven into exile after publication of her controversial first novel, The Country Girls, O'Brien has created a body of work which bears comparison with the very best writers of the twentieth century. Here she is reading the second of two extracts from the book. An interview with the author is also available.
The publication of Edna O'Brien's memoir is one of the major literary events of 2012. Born in Ireland in 1930 and driven into exile after publication of her controversial first novel, The Country Girls, O'Brien has created a body of work which bears comparison with the very best writers of the twentieth century. Here she is reading the first of two extracts. An interview with the author is also available.
For over 50 years Edna O'Brien has been writing about Ireland - in particular, bringing the lives of Irish women to the page with an honesty that had never before been encountered. Her career began in 1960 with The Country Girls, which caused great scandal in her homeland. Driven into exile, she has gone on to create a body of work that bears comparison with the very best writers of the twentieth century. Publication of her memoir - Country Girl - is a major publishing event, and we were lucky to be able to interview her at her London home in September 2012.
Actor turned author John Gordon Sinclair's debut Seventy Times Seven is a pitch-black thriller featuring two Republican brothers, supergrasses and paramilitaries, set in Northern Ireland and Alabama in the early 1990s. There's a climate of violence, bad blood a hangover from The Troubles. This is the second of two extracts to accompany John's interview for the Faber Podcast.
Actor turned author John Gordon Sinclair's debut Seventy Times Seven is a pitch-black thriller featuring two Republican brothers, supergrasses and paramilitaries, set in Northern Ireland and Alabama in the early 1990s. There's a climate of violence, bad blood a hangover from The Troubles. This is one of two extracts to accompany John's interview for the Faber Podcast.
Danny McGuire doesn't like his job, but he's good at it. Since his brother's murder eight years earlier he has become a professional killer: a hit man for hire. Danny's been contracted to eliminate the 'Thevshi' - the Ghost - the most elusive informant that has ever penetrated the Republican movement in Northern Ireland. But there's a problem: the Thevshi claims to know who's responsible for his brother's death. Danny's never killed someone he needed to talk to first ... Revenge and retribution are the drivers in John Gordon Sinclair's white-knuckle debut thriller Seventy Times Seven, which he discusses in our latest Faber Podcast.
Jeet Thayil reads from his Man Booker Prize-shortlisted novel Narcopolis. Recorded at the Faber Social on 2 July 2012, at The Social in London.
Francis Spufford is the author of 'I May Be Some Time: Ice and the Imagination', 'The Child that Books Built' and the genre-defying 'Red Plenty'. His new book, 'Unapologetic' is much more personal and polemical - the subtitle makes plain his purpose: 'Why, despite everything, Christianity can still make surprising emotional sense'. It's an impassioned account of what Christianity means to him as a lived experience, as he explains in this interview for the Faber Podcast.
'Unapologetic' is Francis Spufford's brief, witty, personal, sharp-tongued defence of Christian belief, taking on Richard Dawkins' 'The God Delusion' and Christopher Hitchens' 'God is Not Great'. It's a much more polemical book than the author has written before - his previous books include 'I May Be Some Time: Ice and the Imagination' and the genre-defying 'Red Plenty' - and you can listen to extract from it here.
The Harvest Moon by Ted Hughes, taken from Poems for Children, read by the author.
Ted Hughes' poetry for children is as rich, powerful and magical as anything he wrote. This new recording consists of a collection of the children's poems of Ted Hughes, introduced and selected by acclaimed writer Michael Morpurgo, and read by both Morpurgo and actor Juliet Stevenson. For more information on the audiobook: http://faber.co.uk/work/poems-for-children/9780571259496/
'The Thought-Fox' by Ted Hughes, taken from Poems for Children, read by the author.
Some of the most delightful poems ever written for children, brought evocatively to life in this wonderful new audio edition. Ted Hughes' poetry for children is as rich, powerful and magical as anything he wrote. This new recording consists of a collection of the children's poems of Ted Hughes, introduced and selected by acclaimed writer Michael Morpurgo, and read by both Morpurgo and actor Juliet Stevenson. More information about the audiobook here: http://faber.co.uk/work/poems-for-children/9780571259496/
Do people change their behaviour just because other people do? In his new book 'Positive Linking' (http://www.faber.co.uk/work/positive-linking/9780571279203/) economist Paul Ormerod explores how networks - models for human society's interactions - impact on economic policy and behavioural trends, explaining along the way the '50 Shades of Grey' phenomenon, and why Manchester United has become globally successful whilst near neighbour Rochdale AFC is forever floundering.
The 'Big Music' of the title of Kirsty Gunn's new novel is the pibroch, the formal music of the Highland bagpipes, the most intricate and demanding bagpipe music for both player and listener, far removed from the so-called 'little music' of dance tunes and marches. Kirsty Gunn weaves the pibroch's elaborate structure into a remarkable work of fiction, which is constantly evolving and reshaping. It's an ambitious novel that critics are calling a 'masterpiece'.
Read here by Dan Stevens, 'Winged Back' is Dannie Abse's contribution to 'Jubilee Lines', a new anthology of sixty poems published to mark the Diamond Jubilee. With a poem for each of the years of the Queen's reign, Jubilee Lines offers both a unique portrayal of the times in which we have lived, and an essential portrait of today. The poems celebrate the way we speak, the way we chronicle, the way we love and fight, honour and remember.
Read here by Alex Lanipekun, 'Events & Happenings' is Roger McGough's contribution to 'Jubilee Lines', a new anthology of sixty poems published to mark the Diamond Jubilee. With a poem for each of the years of the Queen's reign, Jubilee Lines offers both a unique portrayal of the times in which we have lived, and an essential portrait of today. The poems celebrate the way we speak, the way we chronicle, the way we love and fight, honour and remember.
Read here by Lyndsey Marshal, '1977 (I am quite sure of this)' is Imtiaz Dharker's contribution to 'Jubilee Lines', a new anthology of sixty poems published to mark the Diamond Jubilee. With a poem for each of the years of the Queen's reign, Jubilee Lines offers both a unique portrayal of the times in which we have lived, and an essential portrait of today. The poems celebrate the way we speak, the way we chronicle, the way we love and fight, honour and remember.
Read by Lyndsey Marshal, 'The Royal Visit' is Fleur Adcock's contribution to Jubilee Lines, a new poetry anthology edited by Poet Laureate Carol Ann Duffy, marking the Diamond Jubilee. With a poem for each of the years of the Queen's reign, Jubilee Lines offers both a unique portrayal of the times in which we have lived, and an essential portrait of today. The poems celebrate the way we speak, the way we chronicle, the way we love and fight, honour and remember.
Read by Samantha Bond, 'On not dying young' is Elaine Feinstein's contribution to Jubilee Lines, a new poetry anthology edited by Poet Laureate Carol Ann Duffy, marking the Diamond Jubilee. With a poem for each of the years of the Queen's reign, Jubilee Lines offers both a unique portrayal of the times in which we have lived, and an essential portrait of today. The poems celebrate the way we speak, the way we chronicle, the way we love and fight, honour and remember.
Read by Samantha Bond, 'World Events' is Ruth Fainlight's contribution to Jubilee Lines, a new poetry anthology edited by Poet Laureate Carol Ann Duffy, marking the Diamond Jubilee. With a poem for each of the years of the Queen's reign, Jubilee Lines offers both a unique portrayal of the times in which we have lived, and an essential portrait of today. The poems celebrate the way we speak, the way we chronicle, the way we love and fight, honour and remember.
Read by Lyndsey Marshal, '1974' is Vicki Feaver's contribution to Jubilee Lines, a new poetry anthology edited by Poet Laureate Carol Ann Duffy, marking the Diamond Jubilee. With a poem for each of the years of the Queen's reign, Jubilee Lines offers both a unique portrayal of the times in which we have lived, and an essential portrait of today. The poems celebrate the way we speak, the way we chronicle, the way we love and fight, honour and remember.
Read by Samantha Bond, 'To a Ladybird' is Sarah Maguire's contribution to Jubilee Lines, a new poetry anthology edited by Poet Laureate Carol Ann Duffy, marking the Diamond Jubilee. With a poem for each of the years of the Queen's reign, Jubilee Lines offers both a unique portrayal of the times in which we have lived, and an essential portrait of today. The poems celebrate the way we speak, the way we chronicle, the way we love and fight, honour and remember.
Read by Lyndsey Marshal, 'Margaret Kirk née Baxter' is Jackie Kay's contribution to Jubilee Lines, a new poetry anthology edited by Poet Laureate Carol Ann Duffy, marking the Diamond Jubilee. With a poem for each of the years of the Queen's reign, Jubilee Lines offers both a unique portrayal of the times in which we have lived, and an essential portrait of today. The poems celebrate the way we speak, the way we chronicle, the way we love and fight, honour and remember.
Read by Lyndsey Marshal, 'In the space of that year' is Clare Shaw's contribution to Jubilee Lines, a new poetry anthology edited by Poet Laureate Carol Ann Duffy, marking the Diamond Jubilee. With a poem for each of the years of the Queen's reign, Jubilee Lines offers both a unique portrayal of the times in which we have lived, and an essential portrait of today. The poems celebrate the way we speak, the way we chronicle, the way we love and fight, honour and remember.
Read by Samantha Bond, 'Home Birth' is Sinead Morrissey's contribution to Jubilee Lines, a new poetry anthology edited by Poet Laureate Carol Ann Duffy, marking the Diamond Jubilee. With a poem for each of the years of the Queen's reign, Jubilee Lines offers both a unique portrayal of the times in which we have lived, and an essential portrait of today. The poems celebrate the way we speak, the way we chronicle, the way we love and fight, honour and remember.
Read here by Samantha Bond, 'Chunnel / Le Tunnel sous la Manche' is Patience Agbabi's contribution to 'Jubilee Lines' for the year 1994, when a particular feat of engineering changed travel for escaping Brits forever. With a poem for each of the years of the Queen's reign, Jubilee Lines offers both a unique portrayal of the times in which we have lived, and an essential portrait of today. The poems celebrate the way we speak, the way we chronicle, the way we love and fight, honour and remember.
Read here by Lyndsey Marshal, this is Liz Lochhead's contribution to 'Jubilee Lines', Carol Ann Duffy's anthology of poems marking 60 years of the Queen's reign. It's a poem about 1966, capturing the age of Vidal Sasson, Mary Quant and emerging feminism. With a poem for each of the years of the Queen's reign, Jubilee Lines offers both a unique portrayal of the times in which we have lived, and an essential portrait of today. The poems celebrate the way we speak, the way we chronicle, the way we love and fight, honour and remember.
As a Foreign Correspondent, Channel 4 News' International Editor Lindsey Hilsum has covered many of the major conflicts of the past two decades: the genocide in Rwanda, war in Iraq, Afghanistan and Kosovo, and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. In 'Sandstorm', her first book, she turns her journalist's eye on the Libyan revolution. It's a remarkable documentary of Gaddafi's 42-year-long reign, filled with first-hand accounts from the Libyan people.
'One day in May the rubbish began to sing ...' Lindsey Hilsum's 'Sandstorm' is a brilliant work of reportage that recounts the history of the Gaddafi regime from its beginning to its bloody end. Here's the author - Channel 4 News' International Editor - reading the third of three exclusive extracts from the book.
'The suburb of Abu Salim that surrounded the prison was always a stronghold of Gaddafi supporters ...' Lindsey Hilsum's 'Sandstorm' is a brilliant work of reportage that recounts the history of the Gaddafi regime from its beginning to its bloody end. Here's the author - Channel 4 News' International Editor - reading the second of three exclusive extracts from the book.
'The first images of the Libyan revolution were blurred and shaky ...' Lindsey Hilsum's 'Sandstorm' is a brilliant work of reportage that recounts the history of the Gaddafi regime from its beginning to its bloody end. Here's the author - Channel 4 News' International Editor - reading the first of three exclusive extracts from the book.
Practising barrister and acclaimed Australian author Elliot Perlman's latest novel is written on an epic scale - spanning six decades and moving from Chicago to New York, Warsaw to Melbourne, and Auschwitz. It's a book about Memory, 'but memory is a wilful dog ... it won't be summoned or dismissed, but it cannot survive without you'. Find out more in this half-hour long interview.
From the frontline of cutting-edge scientific research, Professor Robin Dunbar's new book 'The Science of Love and Betrayal' is a brilliant and sparkling exploration of the extraordinary nature of romantic love. The book tackles some of the most fundamental questions of human behaviour, including - why do we as a species pairbond when few other mammals do? What are the evolutionary advantages of monogamy over promiscuity? And much more.
Tobias Jones's latest book, 'Blood on the Altar', tells in forensic detail the gripping true story the disappearance of a sixteen-year-old girl in an Italian town in 1993. As you’ll hear, nearly a decade after Elisa Claps’ disappearance, the case took a bizarre twist which no novelist would have dared invent.
In our second interview this month George Miller speaks to Philip Oltermann about 'Keeping Up with the Germans: A History of Anglo-German Encounters'. Philip came to the UK from his native Germany in his mid-teens and in the book turns his wry gaze on both countries and their history of mutual misunderstandings.
In the first of 2012's author podcasts George Miller talks to James Palmer about the momentous year 1976, which saw the death of Chairman Mao and inevitable machinations to be his successor, as well as one of the worst natural disasters in human history, the Tangshan earthquake.
Stewart Lee's previous book How I Escaped My Certain Fate drew on three live shows to deconstruct the nature of stand-up comedy. With its heavy use of footnotes there was a nod in structure to T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land. For his new book, the slimmer volume Stewart Lee! The 'If You Prefer a Milder Comedian Please Ask for One!' EP, Lee draws inspiration from The Specials' 1980 five-track EP The Special AKA Live!, live material surplus to any long player. This new book is based on just one stand-up show, in which Stewart Lee examines the mechanics of comedy and the stand-up's craft, as he explains in this interview with comedy critic and Resonance FM DJ Ben Thompson.
The Sunday Sessions consists of twenty-six poems, the contents of two tapes recorded by Philip Larkin in Hull in February 1980, and contains some of his best known and well-loved poems. Only recently rediscovered, the tapes were originally published as a bestselling Faber audiobook, and are now being released as a special vinyl edition to reflect Larkin’s own love of record collecting. Beautifully designed in homage to the great jazz records of the fifties and sixties, and produced on heavyweight vinyl, the release is an unmissable treat for Larkin fans and vinyl enthusiasts alike. Available to buy here: http://bit.ly/ApHMEi
The Sunday Sessions consists of twenty-six poems, the contents of two tapes recorded by Philip Larkin in Hull in February 1980, and contains some of his best known and well-loved poems. Only recently rediscovered, the tapes were originally published as a bestselling Faber audiobook, and are now being released as a special vinyl edition to reflect Larkin’s own love of record collecting. Beautifully designed in homage to the great jazz records of the fifties and sixties, and produced on heavyweight vinyl, the release is an unmissable treat for Larkin fans and vinyl enthusiasts alike. Available to buy here: http://bit.ly/ApHMEi
The Sunday Sessions consists of twenty-six poems, the contents of two tapes recorded by Philip Larkin in Hull in February 1980, and contains some of his best known and well-loved poems. Only recently rediscovered, the tapes were originally published as a bestselling Faber audiobook, and are now being released as a special vinyl edition to reflect Larkin’s own love of record collecting. Beautifully designed in homage to the great jazz records of the fifties and sixties, and produced on heavyweight vinyl, the release is an unmissable treat for Larkin fans and vinyl enthusiasts alike. Available to buy here: http://bit.ly/ApHMEi
Having previously covered the Victorians and the nascent years of the British Film Industry, in 'The West End Front' Matthew Sweet now turns his attention to the grand London hotels during the Second World War - a world within a world populated by an assortment of colourful characters: aristocrats, politicians, spies, dandies, conmen, abortionists, exiles ... rife with scandal.
In this short extract, Matthew Sweet talks about the central place of oral history in researching 'The West End Front', his new book exploring the shady demi-monde of the grand London hotels during the Second World War, a scene dominated by London's most colourful and notorious characters.
One of the most colourful characters to pass through London’s grand hotels during the Second World War was Stella Lonsdale. Did the tales she brought back from occupied France contain a grain of truth, or was she an accomplished and self-serving liar intent on outwitting the British Secret Services? Listen here to Matthew Sweet’s take on a beguiling but ultimately sinister woman, featured in his new book 'The West End Front'.
In her latest book Fiona MacCarthy, one of this country's most distinguished biographers (Byron, Eric Gill, William Morris) explores the life of Morris's lifelong friend, Edward Burne-Jones. One of the Victorian age's most celebrated painters, and also a designer of everything from stained glass to slippers, he was a living embodiment of the quality that MacCarthy refers to as a 'very Victorian hyper-energy'.
It's 1803, and Darcy and Elizabeth have been blissfully married for six years. But a murderer in their midst has other ideas ... 'Death Comes to Pemberley' is a brilliant new 'sequel' to Jane Austen's 'Pride and Prejudice' - but one with a deadly twist. In this extended interview, P. D. James shares her appreciation for Austen, and discusses the challenge of taking such a beloved work of fiction in a wholly unexpected direction ... .
'It was Bingley who broke the silence. "Some more music, if you please Miss Georgiana, if you are not too tired, but please finish your tea first. We must not impose on your kindness."' P. D. James reads an extract from her eagerly awaited new whodunnit, Death Comes to Pemberley.
Recorded at Topping's in Bath, shortly before a packed event, author Sebastian Barry discussed his latest novel, 'On Canaan's Side', with interviewer George Miller. It's a riveting, 30-minute conversation covering the shadow of events from Sebastian's own family's past in his fiction, and the repercussions of some quite extraordinary events. .
In the second part of October's Faber Podcast, Nicholas Rankin discusses his new book, 'Ian Fleming’s Commandos', a gripping account of 30 Assault Unit, which was set up by the future author of James Bond when he worked in naval intelligence during World War Two. This hush-hush band of never more than 300 men amounted to a private army that was never quite approved of by the top brass. In the interview Nicholas talks about how they came to be formed, what their brief was and discusses some of their greatest successes. .
In the first part of October's Faber Podcast interviewer George Miller talks to biographer and historian Tim Jeal about 'Explorers of the Nile', his account of the extraordinary quest by a small band of Victorian explorers who underwent almost unimaginable privations in order to be the first Westerner to reach the source of the White Nile.
In this extended interview, Michael Frayn talks about his childhood in leafy Surrey during the war and his relationship with his father, so memorably and movingly portrayed in his memoir, My Father’s Fortune. He also talks about the impact of the loss of his mother when he was twelve and his early ambitions to be a writer.
In our August podcast George Miller discusses gothic fiction with Richard T. Kelly, author of the spine-chilling The Possessions of Doctor Forrest>. First he talks to Matthew Hollis about his new book, Now All Roads Lead to France, in which he gives us the final years in the life of war poet Edward Thomas, 'the man with the keys to the Paradise of English Poetry'.
Matthew Hollis's biography of the great War Poet describes the final four years of Edward Thomas's life. Thomas died on the first day of the Arras Offensive in 1917, but prior to that had become one of the century's most influential poets - 'a hinge between the old and the new worlds'. And yet his poetry career only took off relatively late, the result of a productive friendship with American poet Robert Frost ...
The tradition of the Gothic novel comes alive once again in this spine-chilling fable, a story of a disappearance, a diabolical bargain, and a terrifying series of physical transformations. Author Richard T. Kelly tells us more about his second novel, The Possessions of Doctor Forrest.
The author of several previous novels, Steve Sem-Sandberg has achieved international acclaim for his detailed, vivid and profoundly affecting portrait of the ghetto in the Polish city of Lodz in 'The Emperor of Lies'.Sebastian Barry called the book ‘monumental’; Carmen Callil compared his achievement in bringing a whole society to life to Dickens. It's an extraordinary work of fiction, and we were delighted to get the chance to have the author tell us more.
For this latest Faber Podcast we are joined by Jane Harris, whose second novel 'Gillespie and I' - a mysterious and enthralling tale set in Victorian Glasgow - was published recently, and by journalist and broadcaster Jonathan Glancey, who sheds light on the little-known region in northern India striving for independence for the past half-century, Nagaland.
Journalist and broadcaster Jonathan Glancey has been fascinated by Nagaland - the remote and largely inaccessible state in the north-eastern corner of India - since childhood. Locked in a war of independence for over 50 years, it's a region of great interest, but is surprisingly little-known. Jonathan Glancey tells us the true story of this forgotten land.
Recorded at the London Review Bookshop in May 2011. Discussing 'the good of the novel' is a panel of writers, publishers and critics, featuring James Wood, Lee Brackstone, Frances Wilson and Amit Chaudhuri. The discussion is chaired by Ray Ryan, co-editor of the book, The Good of the Novel, published by Faber and Faber.
Recorded at the London Review Bookshop in May 2011. Discussing 'the good of the novel' is a panel of writers, publishers and critics, featuring James Wood, Lee Brackstone, Frances Wilson and Amit Chaudhuri. The discussion is chaired by Ray Ryan, co-editor of the book, The Good of the Novel, published by Faber and Faber.
Recorded at the London Review Bookshop in May 2011. Discussing 'the good of the novel' is a panel of writers, publishers and critics, featuring James Wood, Lee Brackstone, Frances Wilson and Amit Chaudhuri. The discussion is chaired by Ray Ryan, co-editor of the book, The Good of the Novel, published by Faber and Faber.
Recorded at the London Review Bookshop in May 2011. Discussing 'the good of the novel' is a panel of writers, publishers and critics, featuring James Wood, Lee Brackstone, Frances Wilson and Amit Chaudhuri. The discussion is chaired by Ray Ryan, co-editor of the book, The Good of the Novel, published by Faber and Faber.
Recorded at the London Review Bookshop in May 2011. Discussing 'the good of the novel' is a panel of writers, publishers and critics, featuring James Wood, Lee Brackstone, Frances Wilson and Amit Chaudhuri. The session was chaired by Ray Ryan, co-editor of the book, The Good of the Novel, published by Faber and Faber.
Recorded at the London Review Bookshop in May 2011. Discussing 'the good of the novel' is a panel of writers, publishers and critics – James Wood, Lee Brackstone, Frances Wilson and Amit Chaudhuri. The discussion is chaired by Ray Ryan, co-editor of the book, The Good of the Novel, published by Faber and Faber.
'I need to make these two men one: the warm, embracing man I adored, and the indifferent, sometimes self-centered, occasionally cruel man who could drink too much, could be crushing, contemptuous, defeating, deadening - this is hard.' So says Judy Golding, writing about her father, William Golding, as she publishes her extraordinary memoir, 'The Children of Lovers' in the year of the centenary of the Nobel Laureate's birth.
In her first book The Observations Jane Harris gave us the very memorable Bessie. In her new book Gillespie and I we meet the equally unforgettable Harriet Baxter, a Londoner who moves to Glasgow for the 1888 International Exhibition and there meets the Gillespie family, before events take a sinister turn and lead to a shocking act and criminal trial that grips the nation. Intrigued? Our Glasgow-born interviewer George Miller asks the Glasgow-raised author to tell us more.
We are delighted to be joined for this month's Faber Podcast by Professor Lewis Wolpert, who discusses his new book You're Looking Very Well and talks us through both the science of ageing and our response as a society to our advancing years. We also speak to Andrew Martin, the creator of the enjoyable Jim Stringer series, which now (in The Somme Stations) sees the Edwardian Railway Detective heading for conflict at the Somme.
In one of his previous books - Malignant Sadness - Professor Lewis Wolpert drew on personal experience to explore the subject of clinical depression, but now, in You're Looking Very Well, he examines the process of ageing, 'the surprising nature of getting old'. Not just the science of ageing, but how we, as individuals and as a society, cope with old age.
Andrew Martin is the author of the Jim Stringer series, detective novels set during Edwardian times that began with The Necropolis Railway in 2002. The seventh and latest instalment is The Somme Stations, in which Stringer leaves his home in York for the front lines of the Somme, as part of the North-Eastern Railway Battalion, aka The Railway Pals. But the men under his charge turn out to be far from pals
"April is the cruellest month..." In a rare recording from 1933, T.S. Eliot reads an extract from The Waste Land. Part of The Waste Land app for iPad, now available to download in the App Store: http://bit.ly/kJATn3
Ted Hughes reads an extract from The Waste Land by T.S. Eliot. Part of The Waste Land app for iPad, now available to download in the App Store: http://bit.ly/kJATn3
Viggo Mortensen reads an extract from The Waste Land by T.S. Eliot. Part of The Waste Land app for iPad, now available to download in the App Store: http://bit.ly/kJATn3
Since 1988, when her first novel The Bean Trees was published, Barbara Kingsolver has become one of the world's most admired writers. Her 1998 novel The Poisonwood Bible was picked for Oprah's Book Club and was shortlisted for the Orange Prize. In 2010 she went one better, winning the Orange Prize for Fiction with The Lacuna. We were thrilled that she found time on a flying visit to the UK in July to tell us more about it.
With Occupied City, David Peace is two-thirds of the way through his Tokyo trilogy. In the first book, Tokyo Year Zero, the setting was a city in the time of defeat. With his latest book it's a city under occupation. The novel's background is the very real (and famous) Hirosawa poisoning case in which 12 people died. Find out what David Peace had to say, including the reason for using 12 different narrative voices, in this exclusive interview with George Miller.
In this rare, 30-minute interview with P. D. James, the doyenne of British Crime tells us about her writing career, which began with the publication of Cover Her Face in 1962. She recalls the years spent developing her craft and the evolution of Adam Dalgliesh, the writers that inspired her, and the role of detective fiction in today's society. A real treat for Crime Fiction fans.
In part two of our interview we discuss Kazuo Ishiguro's earlier books, including the Booker Prize-winning The Remains of the Day and The Unconsoled, which on publication baffled critics but is now viewed as one of the author's greatest achievements. There's discussion too of Ishiguro's childhood and memories of Japan, and what he's working on next. Here's part one of our interview: http://soundcloud.com/faberbooks/kazuo-ishiguro-on-nocturnes.
In a special two-part interview, George Miller talks to Kazuo Ishiguro about his new book Nocturnes, a collection of longish short stories with related themes of music and night, and ambition and disappointment. Under discussion are the challenges of writing in an unfamiliar form, and Ishiguro's approach to writing comedy. Here's the second part of the interview: https://soundcloud.com/faberbooks/kazuo-ishiguro-on-the-remains.
In this extended interview, Sebastian Barry speaks about the many histories of Ireland and, even closer to home, remnants of his own family history to be found in his new book The Secret Scripture in the fictional shape of Roseanne McNulty, one of the novel's two narrators, confined to an asylum for sixty years. .
The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao was the long-awaited first novel from one of today’s most original and electrifying literary voices, Junot Diaz. The book was published early in 2008, which is when we were lucky enough to welcome Junot to the Faber offices, and when he gave this great interview.
In this latest Faber Podcast, recorded in March 2011, our interviewer George Miller meets Edna O'Brien, doyenne of Irish literature and author of numerous books and plays spanning a period of six decades. Edna tells us about her new book of stories, Saints and Sinners, and reveals her writing methods, influences and a progress report on her forthcoming memoir. We also speak to Indian novelist Manju Kapur about her fifth book, Custody, which continues her familiar theme of the effects of globalisation and modernisation on everyday Indian people's lives.
We welcomed Indian novelist Manju Kapur to the Faber offices in March 2011 as she arrived in the UK from New Delhi to promote her fifth book Custody. Her first book Difficult Daughters won a Commonwealth First Book Award, was a number one bestseller in India and has become a firm favourite with reading groups. Each of her books has charted the effects of a changing India - in a time of increased globalisation - on people's personal lives, and makes full use of the complexities of an Indian way of life.
Edna O'Brien first achieved fame and notoriety with The Country Girls, which was banned in Ireland. For fifty years she has written novels, short stories, plays and criticism. Saints and Sinners, her new book of stories, is the first of her fiction to be published by Faber and she discusses the book - along with her writing methods and experimentation, influential writers and the lasting importance of her native Ireland - in this wonderful 30-minute-long interview.
Since her debut novel 'The Country Girls', Edna O'Brien has written over twenty works of fiction along with biographies of James Joyce and Lord Byron. 'Saints and Sinners' is her new collection of stories, and here is Edna reading an extract from the first story in the book, 'Shovel Kings'.
From her new collection of stories 'Saints and Sinners', here's the wonderful Edna O'Brien - the doyenne of Irish literature - reading an extract from 'My Two Mothers'. A moving and memorable passage, that should have you wanting to read more yourself.
This month our regular interviewer George Miller speaks to the Guardian's Jonathan Watts about his new book When a Billion Chinese Jump, his unrivalled eye-witness account of China's industrial rise and the consequent impact on its people and environment. He also speaks to David Olusoga, co-author of The Kaiser's Holocaust, about 19th-century colonialism, in particular Germany's incursion into Africa which took a genocidal turn, and arguably laid the foundations for Nazism.
The Guardian's Asia Environment correspondent Jonathan Watts has spent eight years in China and has witnessed China's growing industrial might, and the consequent impact on the nation's people and environment. When a Billion Chinese Jump is his assessment of what's become a critical situation for the entire planet.
The Kaiser's Holocaust is David Olusoga's (with co-author Casper Erichsen) chilling account of Germany's bid in the 19th century to become an African colonial power - a venture which took a genocidal turn and, the authors argue, was one of the roots of Nazism.
In our latest Faber Podcast we speak to Norman Lebrecht and Francis Spufford. They both address similar questions in their books: how do you capture the essence of real lives; how do you escape some of the constraints of conventional non-fiction and biography; and how can you borrow some of the novelist's techniques and still remain faithful to your subjects. In Why Mahler? and Red Plenty, Lebrecht and Spufford offer their own unique solutions ...
Red Plenty' is a book that's very hard to pin down. It's fictionalised non-fiction. Some of its characters are real, others invented. Here to tell us more for the Faber Podcast is the author, Francis Spufford.
Exclusively for the Faber website, Norman Lebrecht talks us through Why Mahler?, his fascinating celebration of one of the most important classical composers, and one of the most enduringly popular.
In our latest podcast Louise Doughty, with her sixth novel Whatever You Love, tells us how she managed to explore the darkest territory imaginable - dealing with the death of a child. We also talk to science writer Marek Kohn about climate change and the implications it has for all of us - in the UK and beyond - which is the subject of his new book, Turned Out Nice.
Whatever You Love is Louise Doughty's sixth novel, and her first to be published by Faber. Its subject matter is dark - the central story deals with the death of a child and the subsequent fall-out. In an interview for the Faber Podcast Doughty explains how novelists put themselves in the necessary mindset to explore such raw territory.
The UK has seen its wettest January for more than a century, whilst California is suffering its worst drought for the same amount of time. And whilst the band of climate change deniers seems only to grow, the general consensus is that global warming is causing irreversible damage to all parts of the globe. In 'Turned Out Nice', Marek Kohn presents a stark and authoritative vision of the future. He looks specifically at the UK but in the context of the wider world, and how our descendants' relationship to neighbouring countries might be impacted. What might the UK look like if we all carry on in the same way?
There's glamour and drama in both books featured in this month's Faber Podcast. In his new novel The Life and Opinions of Maf the Dog, and of his Friend Marilyn Monroe, Andrew O'Hagan gives us a canine's eye-view of the whirlwind final years in the life of the Hollywood icon. Meanwhile, in Lucy Worsley's Courtiers, the milieu is the Georgian Royal Household, where life below-stairs goes hand-in-hand with all the fun above-stairs.
In his new novel The Life and Opinions of Maf the Dog, and of his friend Marilyn Monroe Andrew O'Hagan takes the very real Maltese terrier (a gift from Frank Sinatra in 1960), and makes him the philosophical commentator on the final years of the Hollywood icon's life.
In this interview recorded exclusively for the Faber Podcast, historian, broadcaster and Chief Curator at the Royal Palaces Lucy Worsley takes us through Courtiers, her guided tour of the lives of the members of the Georgian Royal Household - both above- and below-stairs.
This month, George Miller interviews scholar James Shapiro and novelist Maria McCann, both of whom have explored historical themes in their recent work. In Professor James Shapiro's latest work Contested Will: Who Really Wrote Shakespeare? he delves into a subject that has divided scholars and historians for centuries. In new novel, The Wilding, Maria McCann brings to life a tumultuous family story, played out over generations, and set during the Restoration.
James Shapiro discusses Contested Will: Who Really Wrote Shakespeare? an investigation into a much-debated subject.
Maria McCann discusses her new novel, The Wilding, a passionate family story set in seventeenth-century England.
Our guests this month are Robin Dunbar and Alex Preston. Robin Dunbar is Professor of Evolutionary Anthropology at Oxford and in How Many Friends Does One Person Need? he tackles aspects of human nature, taking in Twitter, Facebook and Dunbar's Number. Alex Preston is the author of This Bleeding City, his debut, cautionary tale of a City insider caught amidst a personal and professional boom and bust.
Robin Dunbar, Professor of Evolutionary Anthropology at Oxford University, tells us more about his new book, How Many Friends Does One Person Need? and explains 'Dunbar's number'.
Alex Preston discusses his acclaimed debut novel, This Bleeding City, his timely fictional account of one man's rise and fall amongst the turbulence of the economic boom and bust.
America looms large in the new novels by Jonathan Lethem and Peter Carey, the interviewees in February 2010's Faber Podcast. George Miller discusses modern-day Manhattan - both real and unreal - as portrayed by Lethem in Chronic City, a book rich in metaphors. Peter Carey's Parrot and Olivier in America goes back a couple of centuries, but as Carey makes clear, there are clear parallels between an America in its infancy and today's state of affairs.
Recorded in January 2010, when he paid a visit to Faber's offices in London, Brooklyn author Jonathan Lethem spoke to us about his new novel, Chronic City.
On his short trip to the UK in February 2010, Peter Carey dropped by the Faber offices to speak to us about his new novel, Parrot and Olivier in America, which was shortlisted for the 2010 Man Booker Prize.
In our latest podcast George Miller speaks to two crime novelists - to Tobias Jones who, with a new series of cases featuring Inspector Castagnetti, follows in the footsteps of the late Michael Dibdin, and to Nicola Upson, whose second Archie Penrose / Josephine Tey case (Angel with Two Faces), takes us back to the Golden Age of Crime.
With The Salati Case, Tobias Jones has created a new Italian detective on the block, Inspector Castagnetti. In an interview for the Faber website he describes his leading man, and gives a quick preview of book two ...
Recorded for the Faber website, here is Nicola Upson discussing Angel with Two Faces, featuring another outing for Inspector Archie Penrose and the very real (although in fictional circumstances) Golden Age crime writer Josephine Tey.
In our November 2009 podcast our host George Miller speaks to renowned biographer and historian Jenny Uglow about Charles II at the height of his powers in her new book A Gambling Man, and to Marcus Chown about We Need to Talk About Kelvin and various cosmic wonders in the everyday.
After years in exile, Charles II returned to England in May 1660 to become King. Click here to hear Jenny Uglow telling us more about A Gambling Man, in which she recounts the King's triumphant return, and the hopes and expectations which it gave rise to.
From the New Scientist's cosmology consultant Marcus Chown comes a fantastic exploration of the science of the world around us. Making it all very accessible, the author explains more about We Need to Talk About Kelvin, and shows us what everyday things might tell us about the Universe.
In our latest podcast, we talk to two biographers about their new books, and their subjects - William Golding and Arthur Ransome. John Carey's insightful study of Golding was called a 'model of its kind' by Robert Harris, whilst Roland Chambers' study of the Swallows and Amazons author is no less impressive, and equally revelatory.
Long before Swallows and Amazons was published, there had been another Arthur Ransome, famous for different reasons. MI6? Bolshevism? All is revealed in Roland Chambers' gripping biography of the very British writer, The Last Englishman.
Celebrated writer and critic John Carey delves into the life of one of the foremost novelists of the twentieth century in a revelatory biography of William Golding.
In our latest podcast George Miller talks to Giles Foden about his nailbitingly tense new book Turbulence, in which he brings to life the role of weather forecasters, unheralded heroes, in the lead-up to D-Day. He also discusses How to Paint a Dead Man with author Sarah Hall, and its prominent theme of how to find meaning in our lives through art
Giles Foden, author of The Last King of Scotland, here discusses his new novel Turbulence and the largely unheralded role of weather forecasters in the run-up to D-Day.
Sarah Hall discusses her new book, How to Paint a Dead Man. From Italy in the 1960s to Cumbria thirty years later, Sarah Hall's Booker-longlisted fourth novel, told through four narrators, is a fierce and brilliant study of art and its place in our lives.
In our May 2009 podcast we speak to Guardian journalist Andy Beckett about his new book, When the Lights Went Out, which examines Britain during the 1970s, that most maligned of all decades. We also speak to Adam Creed about the first in a new British crime series, Suffer the Children, with its very distinctive hero, DI Will 'Staffe' Wagstaffe.
Guardian journalist Andy Beckett discusses his new book When the Lights Went Out, an examination of Britain during that most maligned of decades, the 1970s.
Adam Creed discusses his new book Suffer the Children and introduces the hero of the books, DI Will Wagstaffe, aka 'Staffe'. Since this first in the series, two more cases for Staffe have been published - Willing Flesh (2010) and Pain of Death (2011).
This month's Faber Podcast travels from A to Z - from Argentina and other South American nations documented by Oliver Balch in his new book, Viva South America!, to Zimbabwe, which provides the backdrop to the stories in Petina Gappah's book of stories, An Elegy for Easterly.
In her spirited debut collection, Zimbabwean author Petina Gappah brings us the resilience and inventiveness of the people who struggle to live under Robert Mugabe’s regime. Despite their circumstances, the characters in An Elegy for Easterly are more than victims; they are all too human, with as much capacity to inflict pain as they have to endure it. They struggle with larger issues common to all people everywhere: failed promises, unfulfilled dreams and the yearning for something to anchor them to life.
An interview with Oliver Balch, in which he discusses his new book Viva South America - an examination of the countries and communities of a great continent.
In our March 2009 podcast we discuss the secret lives of cells - their beautiful complexity - with Professor Lewis Wolpert, who publishes his latest book How We Live and Why We Die. We also speak to crime writer Stav Sherez about his new book The Black Monastery, a suspenseful thriller set on a Greek island.
Distinguished broadcaster, embryologist and Professor of Biology as Applied to Medicine at University College, London Lewis Wolpert talks to us about How We Live and Why We Die, and reveals how cells provide the answers to the fundamental questions about our lives.
Stav Sherez talks about his first book for Faber, A Black Monastery, a gripping thriller set on a hedonistic Greek island. A blistering portrait of Paradise gone wrong ...
In our first podcast of 2009 we talk to Graham Farmelo about The Strangest Man, his brilliant study of the extraordinary and eccentric quantum physicist Paul Dirac, one of the greatest minds of the 20th century. We also talk to Sam Taylor about his third novel The Island at the End of the World, an exploration set in the near future of family, intrusion, love, truth and lies.
In an interview for the Faber website, Graham Farmelo discusses the genius of Paul Dirac, one of the greatest minds of the 20th century and an icon of modern thought, and reveals how Dirac inspired him to become a theoretical physicist.
Recorded in February 2009, Sam Taylor discusses his acclaimed third novel The Island at the End of the World, an exploration set in the near future of family, intrusion, love, truth and lies.
Our December 2008 podcast is a festive special. As consumption reaches its annual peak, Kathleen Burk and Michael Bywater, co-authors of Is This Bottle Corked?, share with us their love of wine and the stories wine inspires, and make us thirsty along the way.
In the sixth edition of the Faber Podcast, recorded before Barack Obama's victory at the polls, Paul Auster discusses his latest novel Man in the Dark, set in an America following a different course after a fictional, alternative 2000 Presidential Election result. We also speak to Nadeem Aslam about The Wasted Vigil and the brutal realities of Afghanistan's recent history.
Quintessential New Yorker Paul Auster discusses his new novel Man in the Dark (2008), set in a modern-day America but one which avoided the Bush years with a very different Election result in 2000.
Set in a modern-day Afghanistan, the dazzling new novel from Nadeem Aslam is a tale of family secrets, forbidden love and the tragedy and consequences of war. Nadeem Aslam here discusses the book, which puts a human face on the country's recent brutal history.
The White War is Mark Thompson's fascinating study of the forgotten Italian front during the First World War. For our latest podcast Thompson explores further the repercussions of the conflict on the Italian nation - psychological, cultural and political. We also speak to James Bradley about his gothic chiller The Resurrectionist and the grisly subjects of grave robbing and dissection.
James Bradley, author of The Resurrectionist, spoke to us about the Gothic chiller set in Victorian London, amidst a gruesome world of grave-robbing and human dissection. The Resurrectionist was a 'Richard & Judy Read' and is not a novel for those readers with a sensitive disposition.
An interview with Mark Thompson, author of one of the year's most praised works of history, The White War, which takes an in-depth look at Italian involvement in the First World War, and the subsequent political, social and cultural ramifications. It's an often-overlooked side to the conflict.
In this month's Faber Podcast our interviewer, George Miller, talks to authors Andrew Sean Greer about The Story of a Marriage, in which 1950s American suburban lives are turned upside down by the arrival of a stranger, and to Stephen Armstrong, whose new book War plc exposes the rise of the new corporate mercenary. .
Andrew Sean Greer reveals more about his 2008 novel - The Story of a Marriage - a 1950s based American story of secrets and relationships, and unexpected arrivals which turn a household, and a marriage, on its head.
Stephen Armstrong, author of War plc, explains the phenomenal rise of the new corporate mercenaries and the privatisation of warfare - a multi-billion dollar industry that most of us are not even aware of.
Recovering the past, from forgetting and suppression, is a central theme of both books by authors featured in the third Faber Podcast. In the Booker-shortlisted and Costa Book of the Year-winning The Secret Scripture Sebastian Barry tries to make sense of Ireland's past through Roseanne McNulty, whilst in The Story of Forgetting Stefan Merrill Block weaves a genetic history of early-onset Alzheimer's through his characters' lives.
The 2008 Costa Book of the Year, The Secret Scripture by Sebastian Barry is a story of a life blighted by ignorance and terrible mistreatment, and yet marked still by love and passion and hope. In this extended interview, Sebastian Barry speaks about the many histories of Ireland and, even closer to home, remnants of his own family history to be found in The Secret Scripture in the fictional shape of Roseanne McNulty, one of the novel's two narrators, confined to an asylum for sixty years.
Inspired partly by the author’s own family history, The Story of Forgetting is a heartbreaking and inspiring debut novel from American author Stefan Merrill Block. We spoke to him on his visit to the UK in 2008. His new novel The Storm at the Door is published in July 2011.
In the second Faber Podcast we speak to Adam Mars-Jones about the long-anticipated Pilcrow; biographer Frances Wilson tells us more about the poet's wife, Dorothy Wordsworth; and double Booker Prize-winner Peter Carey, on a visit from New York, drops in to tell us more about Australia and counterculture in His Illegal Self.
His Illegal Self is the story of Che - raised in isolated privilege by his New York grandmother, he is the precocious son of radical student activists at Harvard in the late sixties. Yearning for his famous outlaw parents, denied all access to television and the news, he takes hope from his long-haired, teenage neighbour who predicts: They will come for you, man. They’ll break you out of here ...
Peter Carey, on a short visit from New York early in 2008, dropped in to tell us more about Australia and counterculture, and his story of the love between a young woman and a little boy on the run.
Pilcrow is a wonderful coming-of-age story from an acclaimed literary author, which features one of the most unusual heroes depicted in modern fiction. Adam Mars-Jones describes him in all his glory in this interview recorded in April 2008. The second book in the series, Cedilla, was published in January 2011.
Recorded in April 2008, an interview with author Frances Wilson in which she told us more about The Ballad of Dorothy Wordsworth, her hugely powerful and revealing biography of the great English poet's beloved sister, champion and muse.
In the first Faber Podcast Richard T. Kelly discusses 1990s Britain and the North-East in Crusaders; Jenna Bailey reveals more about the Cooperative Correspondence Club featured in Can Any Mother Help Me?; and Hanif Kureishi divulges more about mid-life crisis and his new novel, Something To Tell You.
Richard T. Kelly's Crusaders was acclaimed as one of 2008's best debut novels. A contemporary parable, it shifts between past and present, its backdrop the thorny history of Labour and industry in the North-East, as a new shade - New Labour - steals across the landscape. The novel's multiple storylines mesh superbly into a compelling narrative, driven by sharp social observation, darkly desperate humour and an undercurrent of impending violence.
The author's second novel, The Possessions of Doctor Forrest, is published in June 2011.
In 1935, a young mother wrote a letter to a magazine, asking readers for help. She was lonely and frustrated, stuck at home with two children, unable to express her thoughts and ideas. The letter struck a chord with women all over the country and someone suggested they start a private magazine. And so the Cooperative Correspondence Club, or CCC, was born ...
In this interview recorded in February 2008, Jenna Bailey reveals more about the the CCC, and tells us more about this amazing true story of motherhood, friendship and a secret magazine.
Hanif Kureishi, author of The Buddha of Suburbia and The Black Album, discusses mid-life crisis and his 2008 novel, Something to Tell You. The novel takes the reader inside the life and mind of Jamal, a fifty-something psychoanalyst, who finds people from his student days in the 1970s returning to haunt him in unsettling ways.
Recorded in September 2007 on a rare visit to Faber and Faber's London offices, Orhan Pamuk discusses Other Colours, a collection of essays and reflections on life, art, books and politics. It was Pamuk's first publication following the award of the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2006.
In this extended interview the Forward Prize-winning poet talks us through his new collection Night. With interviewer George Miller he discusses how landing on his head as a boy turned him into a poet, how he unexpectedly became a war poet and why he is so fascinated by hares. He also reads a number of the book's poems.
Award-winning poet Jo Shapcott discusses her new collection 'Of Mutability' as well as some of her earlier work. The interview is interspersed with a selection of readings. We spoke to Jo in Summer 2010 and since then 'Of Mutability' has gone on to win the prestigious Costa Book of the Year Award, and was shortlisted for Best Collection at the 2010 Forward Poetry Prizes.
German-born poet and translator Michael Hofmann is here in conversation with George Miller. Hofmann reads from his work and reflects on his relationship with his father, the novelist Gert Hofmann.
In this extended interview, Australian poet Emma Jones discusses her debut collection 'The Striped World'. She discusses the origins of her writing as well as its themes and ideas, and reads extracts from her poems.
A spoken word short story by Willy Vlautin, frontman of the band Richmond Fontaine, and author of the novels Lean on Pete, Northline and The Motel Life.
The story features characters from Lean on Pete, and music by Richmond Fontaine.