Faber and Faber

August Brill, an elderly book critic, lies awake in the dark, unable to sleep. Elsewhere in the house are his daughter, Miriam, and granddaughter, Katya, each with her own reasons for lying awake and watchful in the long Vermont night.

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.

An automaton, a man and a woman who can never meet, a secret love story, and the fate of the warming world are all brought to incandescent life in this hauntingly moving novel from one of the finest writers of our time. London 2011, Catherine Gehrig, conservator at the Swinburne museum, learns of the unexpected death of her colleague and lover of thirteen years. As the mistress of a married man she has to grieve in private. One other person knows their secret, the director of the museum, who arranges for Catherine to be given a special project away from prying eyes. Mad with grief, the usually controlled and rational Catherine discovers a series of handwritten notebooks telling the story of the man who originally commissioned the extraordinary and eerie automata she has been asked to bring back to life. With a precocious new assistant, Amanda, at her side, she starts to piece together both the clockwork puzzle and the story of the mechanical creature which was commissioned in 19th century Germany by an English man, Henry Brandling, as a 'magical amusement' for his consumptive son. Having been asked to leave his home by his wife, Henry turns his hurtful departure into an adventure that he records for his young child. But it is Catherine Gehrig, in a strangely stormy and overheated London nearly two hundred years later, who will find comfort and wonder in reading Henry's story. And it is the automata, in its beautiful, uncanny imitation of life, that will link two strangers confronted with the mysteries of life and death, the miracle and catastrophe of human invention and the body's astonishing chemistry of love and feeling.

The year is 1803, and Darcy and Elizabeth have been married for six years. There are now two handsome and healthy sons in the nursery, Elizabeth's beloved sister Jane and her husband Bingley live nearby and the orderly world of Pemberley seems unassailable. But all this is threatened when, on the eve of the annual autumn ball, the guests are preparing to retire for the night when a chaise appears, rocking down the path from Pemberley's wild woodland. As it pulls up, Lydia Wickham — Elizabeth's younger, unreliable sister — stumbles out screaming that her husband has been murdered. Inspired by a lifelong passion for the work of Jane Austen, PD James masterfully recreates the world of Pride and Prejudice, and combines it with the excitement and suspense of a brilliantly-crafted crime story. Death Comes to Pemberley is a distinguished work of fiction, from one of the best-loved, most-read writers of our time.

As The Dream of the Celt opens, it is the summer of 1916 and Roger Casement awaits the hangman in London's Pentonville Prison. Dublin lies in ruins after the disastrous Easter Rising led by his comrades of the Irish Volunteers. He has been caught after landing from a German submarine. For the past year he has attempted to raise an Irish brigade from prisoners of war to fight alongside the Germans against the British Empire that awarded him a knighthood only a few years before. And now his petition for clemency is threatened by the leaking of his private diary and his secret life as a gay man... Vargas-Llosa, with his incomparable gift for powerful historical narrative, takes the reader on a journey back through a remarkable life dedicated to the exposure of barbaric treatment of indigenous peoples by European predators in the Congo and Amazonia. Casement was feted as one of the greatest humanitarians of the age. Now he is about to die ignominiously as a traitor.

'One day there is life... and then, suddenly, it happens there is death'. So begins Paul Auster's moving and personal meditation on fatherhood. The first section, 'Portrait of an Invisible Man', reveals Auster's memories and feelings after the death of his father. In 'The Book of Memory' the perspective shifts to Auster's role as a father. The narrator, 'A', contemplates his separation from his son, his dying grandfather and the solitary nature of writing and story-telling.

As he arrives with his family at the villa in the hills above Nice, Joe sees a body in the swimming pool. But the girl is very much alive. She is Kitty Finch: a self-proclaimed botanist with green-painted fingernails, walking naked out of the water and into the heart of their holiday. Why is she there? What does she want from them all? And why does Joe's enigmatic wife allow her to remain? Profound and thrilling, Swimming Home reveals how the most devastating secrets are the ones we keep from ourselves.

Carl is brutally assaulted in an underground train while protecting a young woman from a gang of thugs. Beaten unconscious he lies for days in a hospital bed — but appears to make a full recovery. On discharge from hospital Carl picks up the threads of his daily life, visiting friends, seeing his girlfriend — until he starts to notice strange leaps in time, distortions in his experience. Is he truly interacting with the outside world, or could he still be in the coma? So begins a dark pschological drama of the unconscious that raises profound questions about the boundary between the real and the imagined.

The year is 1803, and Darcy and Elizabeth have been married for six years. There are now two handsome and healthy sons in the nursery, Elizabeth's beloved sister Jane and her husband Bingley live nearby and the orderly world of Pemberley seems unassailable. But all this is threatened when, on the eve of the annual autumn ball, the guests are preparing to retire for the night when a chaise appears, rocking down the path from Pemberley's wild woodland. As it pulls up, Lydia Wickham — Elizabeth's younger, unreliable sister — stumbles out screaming that her husband has been murdered. Inspired by a lifelong passion for the work of Jane Austen, PD James masterfully recreates the world of Pride and Prejudice, and combines it with the excitement and suspense of a brilliantly-crafted crime story. Death Comes to Pemberley is a distinguished work of fiction, from one of the best-loved, most- read writers of our time.

QI is the smartest comedy show on British television, but few people know that we're also a major legal hit in Australia, New Zealand, Israel and Africa and an illegal one on BitTorrent. We also write books and newspaper columns; run a thriving website, a Facebook page, a Twitter feed; and produce an iPhone App and a sister Radio 4 programme. At the core of what we do is the astonishing fact — painstakingly researched and distilled to a brilliant and shocking clarity. In Einstein's words: 'Everything should be as simple as possible, but not simpler'. Did you know that: cows moo in regional accents; the entire internet weighs less than a grain of sand; the dialling code from Britain to Russia is 007; potatoes have more chromosomes than human beings; the London Underground has made more money from its famous map than it has from running trains; Tintin is called Tantan in Japanese because TinTin is pronounced 'Chin chin' and means penis; the water in the mouth of a blue whale weighs more than its body; Scotland has twice as many pandas as Conservative MPs; Saddam's bunker was designed by the grandson of the woman who built Hitler's bunker; Under the Wildlife and Countryside Act of 1981, it is explicitly illegal in Britain to use a machinegun to kill a hedgehog. 1000 QI Facts will make you look at the universe (and your socks) in an alarming new way.

'Bright Young Things wanted for Big Project'. They're in the prime of their lives but our bright young things are all burnt out. Six sparky twenty-somethings just out of university and working dead-end jobs, they are all bored to tears with their lives and looking for a way out. When a mysterious job is advertised in the newspaper, they all apply. What they least expect is to find themselves prisoners on a deserted island. There's food in the fridge and they have a bedroom each, but there's no telephone, no television, and no way to escape.

This is a new novel from Kate Grenville and a journey back to the Thornhill family of the bestselling The Secret River. Sarah Thornhill, the youngest daughter of William Thornhill of the Hawkesbury River, has always believed she would marry the handsome Jack Langland. Me and Jack, she thinks, how could it go wrong? But there's an ugly secret in Sarah's family. It takes her into the darkness of the past, across an ocean and to a place she never imagined she would be. Kate Grenville takes us back to the early Australia of The Secret River and the Thornhill family. This is Sarah's story. It's a story of love lost and found, tangled histories and how it matters to keep stories alive.

September 1939. The Second World War Has Begun. Even as the fighting rages in Poland, Stalin's long time obsession with the missing treasure of Tsar Nicholas II is rekindled. An informant claims to have information about the whereabouts of the man entrusted by the Tsar with hiding his gold. As the news of the informant reaches Stalin, however, the man is knifed to death. Stalin summons Pekkala to the Kremlin and orders him to solve the murder. To accomplish his mission, he must return to Borodok, the notorious Gulag where he himself spent many years as a prisoner. There, he must pose as a inmate in order to unravel the mystery... As he returns to the nightmares of his past, is this a mission too far for the great Pekkala?

Kate Moore is an expat mum, newly transplanted from Washington D.C. In the cobblestoned streets of Luxembourg, her days are filled with play dates and coffee mornings, her weekends spent in Paris or skiing in the Alps. Kate is also guarding a secret — one so momentous it could destroy her neat little expat life — and she suspects that another American couple are not who they claim to be; plus her husband is acting suspiciously. As she travels around Europe, she finds herself looking over her shoulder, terrified her past is catching up with her. As Kate begins to dig, to uncover the secrets of those around her, she finds herself buried in layers of deceit so thick they threaten her family, her marriage and her life. A thrilling debut-to-remember, Chris Pavone's The Expats will keep you guessing until the very end.

A Brutalised Victim In The Wilds — A solitary tent is found to contain the body of a half-buried woman. She's been stoned to death. There are lash marks across her back. One of her hands has been cut off. A Lone Voice — Two years earlier internet reporter Henning Juul lost his son, Jonas, in a domestic fire. As he returns to work, physically and emotionally scarred, Henning struggles to escape this past and to be taken seriously again as a reporter — by his colleagues, his ex-wife and the police. A Mystery Ignited — Told to cover the story of the woman in the tent, he finds an increasingly dangerous trail and, despite an early arrest, he is convinced that the story is more complex than the police think...

There can be no question that the contents of this book will prove extremely controversial. Many people will be deeply shocked by the nature of Watson's statement. Many will no doubt prefer to reject it rather than surrender the beliefs of a lifetime. Others will at least regret that two of the great mysteries of crime are finally solved... An extraordinary document comes to light which for fifty years had been held on deposit by the bankers of the deceased John Herbert Watson MD — better known as Dr Watson. The document, written by Dr Watson himself, opens in the East End of London in 1888. Three women have been savagely murdered by Jack the Ripper. To calm the public outcry, Scotland Yard approaches London's most eminent detective, Sherlock Holmes, and asks him to investigate the killer. Can Holmes solve the mystery of Jack the Ripper? And why has this story been suppressed for so long? As cunningly plotted as anything by Conan Doyle, The Last Sherlock Holmes Story is a thrilling addition to the Sherlock Holmes canon from another of Britain's best-loved crime writers.

When Rachel Polonsky went to live in Moscow, she found an apartment block in Romanov Street, once a residence of the Soviet elite. One of those ghostly neighbours was Stalin's henchman Vyacheslav Molotov. In his former apartment, Rachel Polonsky discovered his library and an old magic lantern. Molotov — ruthless apparatchik, participant in the collectivizations and the Great Purge — was also an ardent bibliophile. Molotov's library and his magic lantern became the prisms through which Rachel Polonsky renewed her vision of Russia. She visited cities and landscapes associated with the books in the library — Chekhov, Dostoevsky, Pushkin, Akhmatova and many less well-known figures. Some were sent to the Gulag by the man who collected their books.

he boy in the bed was just fifteen years old. He had been handsome, perhaps even recently; but now his face was swollen and disfigured by disease, and by the treatments his doctors had prescribed in the attempt to ward off its ravages. Their failure could no longer be mistaken. When Edward VI — Henry VIII's longed — for son — died in 1553, extraordinarily, there was no one left to claim the title King of England. For the first time, all the contenders for the crown were female. In 1553, England was about to experience the 'monstrous regiment' — the unnatural rule — of a woman. But female rule in England also had a past. Four hundred years before Edward's death, Matilda, daughter of Henry I and granddaughter of William the Conquerer, came tantalisingly close to securing her hold on the power of the crown. And between the 12th and the 15th centuries three more exceptional women — Eleanor of Aquitaine, Isabella of France, and Margaret of Anjou — discovered, as queens consort and dowager, how much was possible if the presumptions of male rule were not confronted so explicitly. The stories of these women — told here in all their vivid humanity — illustrate the paradox which the female heirs to the Tudor throne had no choice but to negotiate. Man was the head of woman; and the king was the head of all. How, then, could a woman be king, how could royal power lie in female hands?

The Soviet Union was founded on a fairytale. It was built on 20th-century magic called 'the planned economy', which was going to gush forth an abundance of good things that the penny-pinching lands of capitalism could never match. And just for a little while, in the heady years of the late 1950s, the magic seemed to be working. Red Plenty is about that moment in history, and how it came, and how it went away; about the brief era when, under the rash leadership of Nikita Khrushchev, the Soviet Union looked forward to a future of rich communists and envious capitalists, when Moscow would out-glitter Manhattan, every Lada would be better engineered than a Porsche and sputniks would lead the way to the stars. And it's about the scientists who did their genuinely brilliant best to make the dream come true, to give the tyranny its happy ending.

It's Easter, 1872. Fires burn in St Petersburg, a prelude to the revolutionary turmoil that will shake Russia a generation later. As the springtime thaw begins, a body rises to the surface of the Winter Canal. Following an anonymous tip-off, magistrate Porfiry Petrovich is drawn into an investigation of the radical intellectuals who seek to fan the flames of revolution. In the meantime, junior magistrate Pavel Pavlovich Virginsky plays a dangerous game of his own. Following a chance meeting with a man he suspects of being an arsonist, he volunteers to infiltrate a terrorist cell. But the young man's loyalties appear divided, his motives conflicted. Will he track down the killers, or to use his position as a magistrate to further a cause with which he sympathises? The issue comes to a head in a shocking and violent confrontation between two generations. «The Cleansing Flames» is the fourth book in R.N. Morris' acclaimed series featuring the investigator from «Crime and Punishment».

It is 1939. In the Soviet Union, Stalin has placed his hopes on a 30-ton steel monster, known as the RED COFFIN. But the design is not yet complete. And when the weapon's secretive and eccentric architect is found murdered, Stalin sends for Pekkala, his most trusted investigator. He is convinced that a sinister group called the White Guild intends to bring about a German invasion before the RED COFFIN is ready. While engineers struggle to complete the design of the tank, Pekkala must expose plans to propel Germany and Russia into conflict.

For the first time, Faber publish a selection from the poetry of Philip Larkin. Drawing on Larkin's four collections and on his uncollected poems, it is chosen by Martin Amis. 'Many poets make us smile; how many poets make us laugh — or, in that curious phrase, 'laugh out loud' (as if there's another way of doing it)? Who else uses an essentially conversational idiom to achieve such a variety of emotional effects? Who else takes us, and takes us so often, from sunlit levity to mellifluous gloom? Larkin, often, is more than memorable: he is instantly unforgettable' — Martin Amis.

How many legs does an octopus have? How much water should you drink every day? What is the chance of tossing a coin and it landing on heads? What is house dust mostly made from? What colour are oranges? Who in the world is most likely to kill you? What was the first dishwasher built to do? A wonderful collection of the most outrageous, fascinating and mind-bending facts. And whatever your answers to the questions above, you can be sure that everything you think you know is wrong.

In the sprawling flatlands of Florida, 28-year-old Miles is photographing the last lingering traces of families who have abandoned their houses due to debt or foreclosure. Miles is haunted by guilt for having inadvertently caused the death of his step-brother, a situation that caused him to flee his father and step-mother in New York 7 years ago. What keeps him in Florida is his relationship with a teenage high-school girl, Pilar, but when her family threatens to expose their relationship, Miles decides to protect Pilar by going back to Brooklyn, where he settles in a squat to prepare himself to face the inevitable confrontation with his father that he has been avoiding for years. Pulsing with the energy of Auster's previous novel, «Invisible», «Sunset Park» is as mythic as it is contemporary, as in love with baseball as it is with literature. It is above all, a story about love and forgiveness — not only among men and women, but also between fathers and sons.