Faber Faber: 1353 books

The pioneering oral historian, George Ewart Evans, began to record the farming ways of East Anglia in the 1950s by listening to old men and women whose memories went back more than fifty or sixty years. Many were agricultural labourers, born before the turn of the century, who had worked on farms...

Us is the eloquent and affecting debut from the talented Zaffar Kunial. In a series of approachable, lyric narratives, the poems in Kunial's hypnotic collection look with a tender toughness at his upbringing by his English mother and Lahore-based, Kashmiri father, and the distances his own life has...

A Choice of Anglo-Saxon Verse contains the Old English texts of all the major short poems, such as 'The Battle of Maldon', 'The Dream of the Rood', 'The Wanderer' and 'The Seafarer', as well as a generous representation of the many important fragments, riddles and gnomic verses that survive from the...

Imaginary Toys (1961) marked the literary debut of the then 26-year-old Julian Mitchell, who would eventually set aside his prizewinning career as a novelist and achieve wider renown as a dramatist, most famously with Another Country (1981). Imaginary Toys is a novel of Oxford after World War...

'This book seems to be about us. Within a day or two of starting it I devised a title: VAC... The subtle idea was to fuse the suggestion of holiday or vacation with that of vacuum...' Paul Ableman's third novel, first published in 1968, is - through the voice of its narrator Billy Soodernim,...

First published in 1962 As Near as I Can Get was Paul Ableman's follow up to his critically acclaimed debut I Hear Voices. Following Alan Peebles, a young man struggling to become a poet, As Near as I Can depicts a mid-twentieth century London of offices, pubs and lodgings. Fuelled by drink...

Her story was this: she had been an orphan, her mother probably a whore. Brought up by nuns, she had lost her faith, found another, fought for it and been imprisoned. This was inexact but serviceable. On the twelfth day of her hunger strike, Maggy is unable to tell the difference between what...

Since 2000, when this biography was first published, Menuhin's name has not faded from public attention, as often happens in the decades after the death of a popular performing artist. Far from it: the centenary of his birth, April 22, 1916, is being marked by celebrations around the world. Yehudi...

Best remembered for his operas and his War Requiem, Benjamin Britten's radical politics and his sexuality have also ensured that he remains a controversial public figure. Journeying Boy is a selection of his diaries that offer the reader an unseen insight into this complex man. Encompassing...

In our time, Bernard Leach has done for pottery what Henry Moore has done for scuplture. This... infinitely rewarding book is an account of his pilgrimage through life.' TimesBernard Leach (1887-1979) was as renowned in Japan and the East as in Europe and America, both as an artist-craftsman...

Britten's Children confronts the edgy subject of the composer's obsessional yet strangely innocent relationships with adolescent boys. One of the hallmarks of Benjamin Britten's music is his use of boys' voices, and John Bridcut uses this to create a fresh prism through which to view the composer's...

A SUNDAY TIMES, TELEGRAPH, ROUGH TRADE, PITCHFORK AND UNCUT MUSIC BOOK OF THE YEAR SHORTLISTED FOR THE PENDERYN MUSIC BOOK PRIZE Art Sex Music is the autobiography of a musician who, as a founding member of the avant-garde group Throbbing Gristle and electronic pioneers Chris & Cosey, has...

Arguably the most important popular British composer of the 20th century, John Barry (1933-2011) enjoyed a career that spanned over fifty years, in which time he won five Academy Awards for pictures includingBorn Free, Out of Africa and Dances with Wolves. His reputation was further gilded by his...

Experience how it feels to be the subject of a blasphemy prosecution! Find out why 'wool' is a funny word! See how jokes work, their inner mechanisms revealed, before your astonished face! In 2001, after over a decade in the business, Stewart Lee quit stand-up, disillusioned and drained, and...