Faber Faber: 1353 books

From his grave in the precincts of Canterbury Cathedral, Dallas Sweetman is called to give account. He tells a story of love and death, jealousy and miraculous happenings, of the divided loyalties of Protestants and Catholics in the Elizabethan Age. Before us, his judges, Dallas seeks to justify the...

Celebrated children's writer Hans Christian Andersen arrives, unannounced, for a stay at Gad's Hill Place in the Kent marshes - home to Charles Dickens and his large, charismatic family. To the lonely and eccentric guest, the members of Dickens' household seem to live a life of unreachable...

Now we've lived together in contentment, more or less, for nigh on twenty year. Like turtle doves. - In prison, I mean, for fuck's sake, the chances of that. PJ and Christy: sworn enemies destined to share one small room for twenty years. As the two men recall the joys and torments of life...

The Secret Life of Poems is a primer which offers a poem - or on occasion an excerpt - succeeding with commentary in which rhythm, form, metre and sources are the order of the day, not ethical commentary or descriptive paraphrase. This brief engagement with forty-seven poems is intended for students...

Being a teacher means weekends. It means thirteen weeks holiday. It means a secure job in uncertain times. But Zoe doesn't want to have to rescue her students. She doesn't want to be called a slag. She doesn't want to sleep with the Head of Science. And she doesn't want to teach a group of...

In the course of her brilliant career Sylvia Townsend Warner wrote superbly in many and diverse forms but never penned a memoir, properly speaking. However, from the 1930s to the 1970s she did contribute a series of short reminiscences to the New Yorker. Scenes of Childhood collects and orders those...

'I thought that no man liveth and dieth to himself, so I put behind what I thought and what I did the panorama of the world I lived in - the things that made me.'Sean O'Casey, 1948 Sean O'Casey's six-part Autobiographies, originally published between 1939 and 1955, is an eloquently comprehensive...

A panoramic novel that stretches from 1912 to 1967 No Laughing Matter is perhaps Angus Wilson's most autobiographical novel. The novel chronicles the end of the bourgeois way of life as seen through the lives of the six Matthews children and their dysfuntional middle-class family. Their parents...

The harshly magnificent landscape of the Elan Valley in Mid Wales was changed utterly in the late 1890s by a reservoir building project initiated by the Corporation of Birmingham in order to supply water to that expanding city. A great feat of civil engineering, the project required the flooding of...

Discharged from active duty after the signing of the peace treaty with France in 1801 Michael Fitton is married and eking out a living as a farmer when he is called back into service with the Royal Navy as Britain embarks on war with France once more. Hoping to be sent into active service in...

'Here at the turn of the leaf a horseman is riding through the space between one world and another . . .' The Mabinogi is the Welsh national epic, a collection of prose tales of war and enchantment, adventure and romance, which have long fascinated readers all over the world. Matthew Francis's...

March 1880, Limehouse. Kitty Peck, a spirited but vulnerable seventeen-year-old, is the reluctant heiress to Paradise, the criminal empire previously overseen by the formidable Lady Ginger. Far from the colour and camaraderie of the music hall where Kitty had been working, this newfound power...

Billy is a lonely boy. He's obsessed with swimming in the sea, which is where he goes to wash his problems far, far away. Thanks to his mum's mystery illness, his dad has been forced to work extra hours to make ends meet, so Billy locks himself away with David Attenborough films, and ponders the magic...

'Segaki is the story of two men, a woman, a dog, and a handful of snails. It is a very simple story. But like most simple stories, it is also a parable... It is the third volume of three novels concerned with various aspects of the religious experience... Segaki deals with [the] getting of wisdom,...