Böcker utgivna av Faber & Faber

We are the product of our evolutionary history and this history colours our everyday lives - from why we kiss to how religious we are. In How Many Friends Does One Person Need? Robin Dunbar explains how the distant past underpins our current behaviour, through the groundbreaking experiments that have changed the thinking of evolutionary biologists forever. He explains phenomena such as why 'Dunbar's Number' (150) is the maximum number of acquaintances you can have, why all babies are born premature and the science behind lonely hearts columns. Stimulating, provocative and highly enjoyable, this fascinating book is essential for understanding why humans behave as they do - what it is to be human.

With America quietly gearing up for war in the Middle East, twenty-year-old Tassie Keltjin, a 'half-Jewish' farmer's daughter from the plains of the Midwest, has come to university - escaping her provincial home to encounter the complex world of culture and politics. When she takes a job as a part-time nanny to a couple who seem at once mysterious and glamorous, Tassie is drawn into the life of their newly-adopted child and increasingly complicated household. As her past becomes increasingly alien to her - her parents seem older when she visits; her disillusioned brother ever more fixed on joining the military - Tassie finds herself becoming a stranger to herself. As the year unfolds, love leads her to new and formative experiences - but it is then that the past and the future burst forth in dramatic and shocking ways. Refracted through the eyes of this memorable narrator, A Gate at the Stairs is a lyrical, beguiling and wise novel of our times.

Sinuously constructed in four interlocking parts, Invisible opens in New York City in the spring of 1967 when twenty-year-old Adam Walker, an aspiring poet and student at Columbia University meets the enigmatic Frenchman Rudolf Born, and his silent and seductive girlfriend Margot. Before long, Walker finds himself caught in a perverse triangle that leads to a sudden, shocking act of violence that will alter the course of his life.Three different narrators tell the story, as it travels in time from 1967 to 2007 and moves from New York to Paris and to a remote Caribbean island in a story of unbridled sexual hunger and a relentless quest for justice.With uncompromising insight, Auster takes us to the shadowy borderland between truth and memory, authorship and identity to produce a work of unforgettable power that confirms his reputation as one of America's most spectacularly inventive writers.

A woman in a township in Zimbabwe is surrounded by throngs of dusty children but longs for a baby of her own; an old man finds that his job making coffins at No Matter Funeral Parlour brings unexpected riches; a politician's widow quietly stands by at her husband's funeral watching his colleagues bury an empty coffin. Petina Gappah's characters may have ordinary hopes and dreams, but they are living in a world where a loaf of bread costs half a million dollars; a country expected to have only four presidents in a hundred years; and a place where people know exactly what will be printed in the one and only daily newspaper because the news is always, always good. 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.

Inspector Archie Penrose invites Josephine Tey down to his family home in Cornwall so she can recover from the traumatic events depicted in An Expert in Murder. Josephine welcomes the opportunity, especially since Archie's home is near the famous Minack open-air theatre perched on the cliffs overlooking the sea. However, Josephine's hopes of experiencing a period of rest are dashed when her arrival coincides with the funeral of a young man from the village who had drowned when his horse inexplicitly leapt into the nearby lake.When another young man disappears and the village's curate falls from the cliffs of the Minack Theatre onto the rocks below, Josphine and Archie begin to suspect the involvement a cold-blooded murderer.As Josephine and Archie try to unravel the mystery, they begin to see death as an angel with two faces - one gazing at the violence in the present, the other looking back to the crimes hidden in the past.

The humour of self-deprecation is peculiarly English. Few people do it better than Jeremy Lewis. His first two autobiographical volumes - Playing for Time and Kindred Spirits - are being reissued in Faber Finds to coincide happily with his third volume - Grub Street Irregular - being published by HarperCollins.The second volume of Jeremy Lewis's wonderfully entertaining autobiography sees him starting out, with a mixture of diffidence and self-professed incompetence, on a career in publishing. Along the way we see him tucking into cod and chips with Jane and Geoffrey Grigson, drinking tea with Kingsley Amis and retsina with Patrick Leigh-Fermor. When reviewing this book, Christopher Sinclair-Stevenson called it 'The funniest book I have ever read about publishing...this is not merely a hugely entertaining book, but an important one'. That judgment still stands.

From Pulitzer Prize nominee and award winning author of Homeland, The Poisonwood Bible and Flight Behaviour, The Lacuna is the heartbreaking story of a man torn between the warm heart of Mexico and the cold embrace of 1950s America in the shadow of Senator McCarthy. Born in America and raised in Mexico, Harrison Shepherd is a liability to his social-climbing flapper mother, Salome. When he starts work in the household of Mexican artists Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo - where the Bolshevik leader, Lev Trotsky, is also being harboured as a political exile - he inadvertently casts his lot with art, communism and revolution. A compulsive diarist, he records and relates his colourful experiences of life with Diego Rivera, Frida Kahlo and Trotsky in the midst of the Mexican revolution. A violent upheaval sends him back to America; but political winds continue to throw him between north and south, in a plot that turns many times on the unspeakable breach - the lacuna - between truth and public presumption.

In 1521, Suleiman the Magnificent, ruler of the Ottoman Empire at the height of its power, despatched an invasion fleet to the island of Rhodes. This was the opening shot in an epic struggle between rival empires and faiths, and the ensuing battle for control of the Mediterranean would last sixty years. Empires of the Sea tells the story of this great contest. It is a fast-paced tale of spiralling intensity that ranges from Istanbul to the Gates of Gibraltar and features a cast of extraordinary characters: Barbarossa, the pirate who terrified Europe; the risk-taking Emperor Charles V; the Knights of St John, last survivors of the crusading spirit; and the brilliant Christian admiral Don Juan of Austria. Its brutal climax came between 1565 and 1571, six years that witnessed a fight to the finish, decided in a series of bloody set pieces: the epic siege of Malta; the battle for Cyprus; and the apocalyptic last-ditch defence of southern Europe at Lepanto - one of the single most shocking days in world history that fixed the frontiers of the Mediterranean world we know today.Empires of the Sea follows Roger Crowley's first book, the widely praised Constantinople: The Last Great Siege. It is page-turning narrative history at its best - a story of extraordinary colour and incident, rich in detail, full of surprises and backed by a wealth of eyewitness accounts.

Michael, a writer of pornographic fiction, creates an ideal world of sex through his two stock athletes, Colonel Grimshaw and Mavis Carmichael, while he bungles every phase of his entanglement with an older woman who has the misfortune to fall in love with him. But his insensitivity to this love is in direct contrast to the tenderness with which he attempts to make his aunt's slow death in hospital tolerable, while his employer, Maloney, failed poet and comic king of pornographers, comes gradually to preside over this broken world. Everywhere in this rich novel is the drama of opposites, but, above all, sex and death are never far from each other.'A marvellous novel, deep, moving, rich and resonant, about love, lust, life and death.' Sunday Express'A novel that succeeds beautifully in doing what it sets out to do; to record and illuminate varieties of disenchantment.' Times Literary Supplement'An admirable book, one of the finest I have read for a long time ... I cannot recommend Mr McGahern too strongly.' Sunday Telegraph

Moran is an old Republican whose life was forever transformed by his days of glory as a guerilla leader in the War of Independence. Now, in old age, living out in the country, Moran is still fighting - with his family, his friends, even himself - in a poignant struggle to come to terms with the past.'A masterpiece.' John Banville'John McGahern is the Irish novelist everyone should read.' Colm Toibin'It is compact but not dense, spare yet rich, and brimming with tension.' Observer'An overwhelming experience.' The Times'McGahern brings us that tonic gift of the best fiction, the sense of truth - the sense of transparency that permits us to see imaginary lives more clearly than we see our own.' John Updike'One of the greatest writers of our era.' Hilary Mantel, New Statesman

'The night it happened I was drunk, almost passed out, and I swear to God a bird came flying through my motel room window . . .'Narrated by Frank Flannigan, The Motel Life tells the story of how he and his brother Jerry Lee take to the road in a bid to escape the hit-and-run accident which kick-starts the narrative. Written with huge compassion, and an eye for the small details of life, it has become one of the most talked about debuts of recent years. 'That rare beast: a book with the cadence of an old, well-loved song. Sad, haunting, and strangely beautiful.' John Connolly, author of The Black Angel 'A serene and assured piece of minor-key Americana . . . Not many people do anything similar over here, with the same sense of small town big-sky melancholy. So British readers looking for a shot of post-Beat generation blues should reach with confidence for Vlautin's book.' Jonathan Gibbs, Independent

'A monumental achievement - one of the great scientific biographies.' Michael Frayn The Strangest Man is the Costa Biography Award-winning account of Paul Dirac, the famous physicist sometimes called the British Einstein. He was one of the leading pioneers of the greatest revolution in twentieth-century science: quantum mechanics. The youngest theoretician ever to win the Nobel Prize for Physics, he was also pathologically reticent, strangely literal-minded and legendarily unable to communicate or empathize. Through his greatest period of productivity, his postcards home contained only remarks about the weather.Based on a previously undiscovered archive of family papers, Graham Farmelo celebrates Dirac's massive scientific achievement while drawing a compassionate portrait of his life and work. Farmelo shows a man who, while hopelessly socially inept, could manage to love and sustain close friendship.The Strangest Man is an extraordinary and moving human story, as well as a study of one of the most exciting times in scientific history. 'A wonderful book . . . Moving, sometimes comic, sometimes infinitely sad, and goes to the roots of what we mean by truth in science.' Lord Waldegrave, Daily Telegraph

Winner of the Whitbread First Novel Award'A wonderful novel. I doubt I will read a funnier one, or one with more heart, this year, possibly this decade.' Angela Carter, GuardianThe hero of Hanif Kureishi's first novel is Karim, a dreamy teenager, desperate to escape suburban South London and experience the forbidden fruits which the 1970s seem to offer. When the unlikely opportunity of a life in the theatre announces itself, Karim starts to win the sort of attention he has been craving - albeit with some rude and raucous results.'One of the best comic novels of growing up, and one of the sharpest satires on race relations in this country that I've ever read.' Independent on Sunday'Brilliantly funny. A fresh, anarchic and deliciously unrestrained novel.' Sunday Times'A distinctive and talented voice, blithe, savvy, alive and kicking.' Hermione Lee, Independent

Michael Frayn's classic novel is set in the crossword and nature notes department of an obscure national newspaper during the declining years of Fleet Street, where John Dyson dreams wistfully of fame and the gentlemanly life - until one day his great chance of glory at last arrives.Michael Frayn is the celebrated author of fifteen plays includingNoises Off,CopenhagenandAfterlife.His bestsellingnovels includeHeadlong, which was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize,Spies, which won the Whitbread Best Novel Award andSkios, which was longlisted for the Man Booker Prize.'Still ranks with Evelyn Waugh'sScoopas one of the funniest novels about journalists ever written.'Sunday Times'A sublimely funny comedy about the ways newspapers try to put lives into words.'Spectator

In these eleven intersecting stories, Rohinton Mistry reveals the rich, complex patterns of life inside a Bombay apartment building. The occupants - from Jaakaylee, the ghost-seer, through Najami, the only owner of a refrigerator in Firozsha Baag, to Rustomji the Curmudgeon and Kersi, the boy whose life threads through the book - all express, knowingly or unknowingly, the tensions between the past and the present, between the old world and the new. Compassionate and extremely funny, Tales from Firozsha Baag illuminates the meaning of change through the brilliantly textured mosaic of seemingly ordinary lives. 'Mistry's joyful notation of the world reminds us that description is one of fiction's first and gravest tasks.' Guardian 'A fine collection . . . the volume is informed by a tone of gentle compassion for seemingly insignificant lives.' New York Times

Nariman Vakeel is a seventy-nine-year-old Parsi widower beset by Parkinson's disease and haunted by memories of the past. He lives with his two middle-aged step-children. When Nariman's illness is compunded by a broken ankle, he's forced to take up residence with his daughter Roxana, her husband Yezad and their two young sons. This new responsibility for Yezad, who is already besieged by financial worries, proves too much and pushes him into a scheme of deception - with devastating consequences.Wise and compassionate, Family Matters has all the richness, the gentle humour and the narrative sweep that have earned Rohinton Mistry the highest accolades.'It is rare to discover a novel in which the characters are so well drawn that you feel wrapped up in their problems, rather than just privy to them.' Independent on Sunday 'A brilliant novel from one of India's finest living novelists.' Observer

Nearing her one-hundredth birthday, Roseanne McNulty faces an uncertain future, as the Roscommon Regional Mental hospital where she's spent the best part of her adult life prepares for closure. Over the weeks leading up to this upheaval, she talks often with her psychiatrist Dr Grene, and their relationship intensifies and complicates. Told through their respective journals, the story that emerges is at once shocking and deeply beautiful. Refracted through the haze of memory and retelling, Roseanne's story becomes an alternative, secret history of Ireland's changing character and the story of a life blighted by terrible mistreatment and ignorance, and yet marked still by love and passion and hope.

Commander Adam Dalgliesh is already acquainted with the Dupayne Museum in Hampstead, and with its sinister murder room celebrating notorious crimes committed in the interwar years, when he is called to investigate the killing of one of the trustees. He soon discovers that the victim was seeking to close the museum against the wishes of both staff and fellow trustees. Everyone, it seems, has something to gain from the crime.When it becomes clear that the killer is prepared to kill again, inspired by the real-life crimes from the murder room, Dalgliesh knows that to solve this case he has to get into the mind of a ruthless killer. The investigation is complicated for Dalgliesh by his love for Emma Lavenham, but their relationship, at a sensitive stage for them both, is continually frustrated by the demands of his job. As step by step he moves closer to the murderer, is the investigation taking him further away from commitment to the woman he loves? Award-winning P.D. James (author of Death Comes to Pemberley, The Murder Room and A Certain Justice) plots a thrilling work of crime fiction packed with intrigue and suspense. In 2004, this novel was adapted for BBC television and starred Martin Shaw as Adam Dalgliesh and Janie Dee as Emma Lavenham.

From P.D. James, one of the masters of British crime fiction, comes the seventh Adam Dalgliesh novel, set against the bleak fens of East Anglia. Death of An Expert Witness is a classic work of detective fiction packed with forensic detail, intrigue and suspense. When a young girl is found murdered in a field, the scientific examination of the exhibits is just a routine job for the staff of Hoggatt's forensic science laboratory. But nothing could have prepared them for the brutal death of one of their own. When the senior biologist is found dead in his laboratory Commander Dalgliesh is called to the bleak fens of East Anglia, where the murderer is lying in wait to strike again. With a wealth of potential suspects and cautious forensic scientists quick to pass on the blame, Dalgliesh becomes embroiled in the complicated passions that lie hidden beneath the calm surface of the laboratory. From PD James, the bestselling author of Death Comes To Pemberley, Children of Men and Death in Holy Orders, comes an atmospheric and thrilling work of detective fiction set in a forensic laboratory on the bleak fens of East Anglia. This novel was adapted into an ITV television series in 1983 and starred Roy Marsden, Geoffrey Palmer and Ray Brooks.

August 1946. One year on from surrender and Tokyo lies broken and bleeding at the feet of its American victors. Against this extraordinary historical backdrop, Tokyo Year Zero opens with the discovery of the bodies of two young women in Shiba Park. Against his wishes, Detective Minami is assigned to the case, and as he gets drawn ever deeper into these complex and horrific murders, he realises that his own past and secrets are indelibly linked to those of the dead women and their killer.

Barbara Kingsolver's acclaimed international bestseller tells the story of an American missionary family in the Congo during a poignant chapter in African history. It spins the tale of the fierce evangelical Baptist, Nathan Price, who takes his wife and four daughters on a missionary journey into the heart of darkness of the Belgian Congo in 1959. They carry with them to Africa all they believe they will need from home, but soon find that all of it - from garden seeds to the King James Bible - is calamitously transformed on African soil. Told from the perspective of the five women, this is a compelling exploration of African history, religion, family, and the many paths to redemption. The Poisonwood Bible was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize in 1999 and was chosen as the best reading group novel ever at the Penguin/Orange Awards. It continues to be read and adored by millions worldwide.

Oracle Night is a compulsively readable novel by 'one of the great writers of our time.' (San Francisco Chronicle).Several months into his recovery from a near-fatal illness, novelist Sidney Orr enters a stationery shop in Brooklyn and buys a blue notebook. It is September 18, 1982, and for the next nine days Orr will live under the spell of this blank book, trapped inside a world of eerie premonitions and bewildering events that threaten to destroy his marriage and undermine his faith in reality.If The New York Trilogy was Paul Auster's detective story, his mesmerizing eleventh novel reads like an old-fashioned ghost story. But there are no ghosts in this book - only flesh-and-blood human beings, wandering through the haunted realms of everyday life. Oracle Night is a narrative tour de force that confirms Auster's reputation as one of the boldest, most original writers at work in America today. 'His old-fashioned art of creating suspense . . . which rivals M. R. James or Conan Doyle. In fact, Oracle Night is best read as a post-modern ghost story.' The Guardian

The Book of Illusions, written with breath-taking urgency and precision, plunges the reader into a universe in which the comic and the tragic, the real and the imagined, and the violent and the tender dissolve into one another. One man's obsession with the mysterious life of a silent film star takes him on a journey into a shadow-world of lies, illusions, and unexpected love. After losing his wife and young sons in a plane crash, Vermont professor David Zimmer spends his waking hours mired in grief. Then, watching television one night, he stumbles upon a lost film by silent comedian Hector Mann, and remembers how to laugh . . .Mann was a comic genius, in trademark white suit and fluttering black moustache. But one morning in 1929 he walked out of his house and was never heard from again. Zimmer's obsession with Mann drives him to publish a study of his work; whereupon he receives a letter postmarked New Mexico, supposedly written by Mann's wife, and inviting him to visit the great Mann himself. Can Hector Mann be alive? Zimmer cannot decide - until a strange woman appears on his doorstep and makes the decision for him, changing his life forever.'A nearly flawless work . . . Auster will be remembered as one of the great writers of our time.' San Francisco Chronicle 'Auster's elegant, finely calibrated The Book of Illusions is a haunting feat of intellectual gamesmanship.' TheNew York Times

'I was looking for a quiet place to die. Someone recommended Brooklyn, and so the next morning I travelled down there from Westchester to scope out the terrain . . .'So begins Paul Auster's remarkable new novel, The Brooklyn Follies. Set against the backdrop of the contested US election of 2000, it tells the story of Nathan and Tom, an uncle and nephew double-act. One in remission from lung cancer, divorced, and estranged from his only daughter, the other hiding away from his once-promising academic career, and, indeed, from life in general.Having accidentally ended up in the same Brooklyn neighbourhood, they discover a community teeming with life and passion. When Lucy, a little girl who refuses to speak, comes into their lives, there is suddenly a bridge from their pasts that offers them the possibility of redemption. Infused with character, mystery and humour, these lives intertwine and become bound together as Auster brilliantly explores the wider terrain of contemporary America - a crucible of broken dreams and of human folly. 'Auster at the top of his game. This superb novel about human folly turns out to be tremendously wise.' New Statesman

From the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Less.'A riveting and fascinating novel full of stunning observations and brilliant moments of truth and sympathy.' Colm ToibinIt is 1953, and in San Francisco Pearlie, a dutiful housewife, finds herself caring for both her husband's fragile health and her polio-afflicted son. Then one morning someone from her husband's past appears on their doorstep. His arrival throws all the certainties by which Pearlie has lived into doubt, and is brought face to face with the desperate measures people are prepared to take to escape the confines of their lives.

Named as one of the 100 Best Things in the World by GQ magazine, the riotous adventures of Vernon Gregory Little in small-town Texas and beachfront Mexico mark one of the most spectacular, irreverent and bizarre debuts of the 21st century so far. Its depiction of innocence and simple humanity (all seasoned with a dash of dysfunctional profanity) in an evil world is never less than astonishing. The only novel to be set in the barbecue sauce capital of Central Texas, Vernon God Little suggests that desperate times throw up the most unlikely of heroes.'A showpiece of superb comic writing . . . Out of the detritus of a morally bankrupt society, Pierre has fashioned a work of comic art.' Sunday Telegraph'In a just world, this ridiculously funny first novel would come free with every television set . . . Not since reading John Kennedy O'Toole's masterpiece, A Confederacy of Dunces . . . have I laughed so much or felt such sheer delight at the discovery of a wholly fresh comic voice . . . this novel reads like a modern day fairytale.' Mail on Sunday

Turning to the window, Zen eyed his spectral other, so smugly solid and substantial. He felt as if he were the reflection and that image the original. 'A Shadow of his former self,' as the stock phrase went. A hopeless invalid. A sad case.When the corpse of the shady industrialist who owns the local football team is found both shot and stabbed, Italian police inspector Aurelio Zen is called to Bologna to oversee the investigation. Recovering slowly from surgery, and fleeing an equally painful crisis in his personal life, Zen is only too happy to take on what at first appears to be a routine and relatively undemanding assignment.But soon a world-famous university professor is shot with the same gun, and the case threatens to spin out of control...

Through a series of exquisitely observed autobiographical sketches, Adrian Tomine explores his life in comics - from an early moment on the playground being bullied, to a more recent experience, lying on a gurney in the hospital, and having the nurse say 'Hey!

It contains love songs, work songs, songs about the pains and anxieties of existence, songs of consolation, songs about various kinds of spiritual quest and the realms of the mystical, and songs which deal with healing and reconciliation, both with the self and with others.