Faber Faber: 1353 books

Listen, girls, if we stick together there's no ways we'll even get to the second round...Young, lost and out of control, a bunch of Catholic schoolgirls go wild for a day in the big city, the singing competition a mere obstacle in the way of sex, sambuca and a night back home with the submarine...

'Of all branches of human endeavour, diplomacy is the most protean.' That is how Harold Nicolson begins this book. It is an apt opening. The Paris Conference of 1919, attended by thirty-two nations, had the supremely challenging task of attempting to bring about a lasting peace after the global catastrophe...

The news that a government inspector is due to arrive in a small Russian town sends its bureaucrats into a panicked frenzy. A simple case of mistaken identity exposes the hypocrisy and corruption at the heart of the town in this biting moral satire. David Harrower's version of Nikolai Gogol's...

A young man has an affair with a married woman. He is terrified her husband will challenge him to a duel and kill him. Meanwhile he toys with the affections of another and, for a moment, life seems full of joy. The doorbell rings. The husband enters the room. Based on Schnitzler's play...

First there is an opportunity, then there is a betrayal. Twenty years have gone by. Much has changed but just as much remains the same. Mark Renton returns to the only place he can ever call home. They are waiting for him, of course: Spud, Sick Boy, and Frank Begbie. But they are not...

Welcome to our war The Two Worlds of Charlie F. is a soldier's view of service, injury and recovery. Moving from the war in Afghanistan, through the dream world of morphine-induced hallucinations to the physio rooms of Headley Court, the play explores the consequences of injury, both physical...

Angus Wilson's first volume of short stories, The Wrong Set was first published in 1949 to immense critical acclaim. The collection is a brilliantly funny exposure of the protective devices with which people seek to mask deep-laid egotism. There is the wallowing in self-adulation on...

Hugo Williams's new collection summons the poet's past selves in order of appearance, as in an autobiography, showing in poems as clear as rock pools that the plain truth is only as plain as the props and make-up needed to stage it. Childhood and school time offer up the amateur theatricals...

This first collection of Nick Dear's work for the stage displays the breadth and achievement of one of the most talented and inventive dramatists writing in Britain today. The volume contains two of his re-workings of eighteenth-century history, The Art of Success and In the Ruins, his intelligent...

The Syrian desert. Third century AD. Zenobia, warrior Queen of Palmyra, moves her forces into battle with Aurelian, Emperor of Rome. Meanwhile, her son is engaged in bizarre chemical experiments with Porphyry, a philosophy student with his own secret. A story of love and adventure at the time...

Patron? Collaborator? Employer? Voyeur? Lover? Questioned about the nature of his relationship with the 3rd Earl of Southampton, William Shakespeare is on trial. The evidence: tender poems, financial dependency, attempted revolution. A compelling new drama set in Elizabethan England...

Deep in the Hampshire countryside Edward Thomas, disaffected husband, exhausted father and tormented writer, scrapes a living. In 1913 he meets American poet Robert Frost and everything changes. As their friendship blossoms Edward writes, emerging from his cocoon of self-doubt into one of the most...

The Hogarth Plays catch one of England's most celebrated artists at two crucial points in his career: once at the beginning, and once at the end. In The Art of Success the events of ten tumultuous years are compressed into a single night, as newlywed William Hogarth makes his way through eighteenth-century...

Some say power's an illusion. But Louis is the master of illusion. He has turned government into a spectacle, politics into a circus. Nick Dear's new play on the origins of the Sun King is a dark and dazzling tale of ambition, corruption and illusion. The play premiered at the Royal National Theatre in London, in June 2003.