Faber and Faber

There can't be a woman alive who hasn't once realised, in a moment of panic, that she's in the wrong place at the wrong time with the wrong man. Louise Doughty, more sure-footed with each novel, leads her unnerved reader into dark territory. A compelling and bravely-written book. (Hilary Mantel). A superb novel. Grown-up, genuinely suspenseful, wonderfully well-constructed, intelligent and provocative. I really didn't want to finish it. And I don't say that very often. (Julie Myerson). Once you start you can't stop reading. Terrific. (Helen Dunmore). Yvonne Carmichael has worked hard to achieve the life she always wanted: a high-flying career in genetics, a beautiful home, a good relationship with her husband and their two grown-up children. Then one day she meets a stranger at the Houses of Parliament and, on impulse, begins a passionate affair with him — a decision that will put everything she values at risk. At first she believes she can keep the relationship separate from the rest of her life, but she can't control what happens next. All of her careful plans spiral into greater deceit and, eventually, a life-changing act of violence. Apple Tree Yard is a psychological thriller about one woman's adultery and an insightful examination of the values we live by and the choices we make, from an acclaimed writer at the height of her powers.

Commander Dalgliesh returns in P. D. James' classical detective novel full of atmosphere and suspense, set in her beloved East Anglia. Death in Holy Orders is set in an Anglican theological college on a desolate stretch of the East Anglian coast, a location which she has made particularly her own. When the body of one of the students is found on the shore smothered by a fall of sand, his wealthy father demands that Scotland Yard re-examines the verdict of accidental death. Dalgliesh has visited St Anselm's in his boyhood and, as he is due for a holiday, agrees to pay a visit, expecting no more than a nostalgic return to old haunts and a straightforward examination of the evidence given at the inquest. Instead he finds himself embroiled in one of the most horrific and puzzling cases of his career. Other visitors come to the college on the weekend of his arrival, not all of them with benign intent. One will never leave it alive. Death in Holy Orders, a masterly exploration of an isolated and beleagured community coping with the evil and disruption of murder, has all the qualities which distinguish P. D. James as a novelist: the sensitive evocation of place, a complex and credible mystery, respect for forensic detail and the tension of a plot that never flags.

One of the best-loved poems from Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats is given a new life in this stunning picture book with illustrations from Arthur Robins that perfectly convey all the wit and humour of Eliot's creation.

And just as your plan is developing, so you're evolving, too. You're changing in ways you never would have thought possible before. But that's acceptable to you. You're prepared to do whatever it takes...Why? Because you're the specialist. And that's how you're going to succeed. What do you do if your fiancee goes missing, presumed taken? If you're Daniel Trent, a highly-trained specialist in hostage negotiation, the answer is simple: You find out who took her and you make them talk. But what if your chief suspect is kidnapped? How do you get him back quickly — and alive? Set in Marseille, Dead Line is a fast-paced thriller that pitches the reader into Daniel's world, as he tries desperately to secure the release of Jerome Moreau from a ruthless gang in order to interrogate him on the whereabouts of his fiancee. When things don't go according to plan however, Daniel must use all his skills and instincts to find the answers he's looking for, but will he be in time?

Can you see him? My kitten? Close your eyes tight. His fur is so soft and all silvery white Imagine him quick! Have you imagined enough? Oh, good, you can see him! It's Squishy McFluff! When Ava discovers an imaginary cat in the cabbage patch, she knows she's found a new best friend. Together, Ava and Squishy McFluff get up to all kinds of mischief...Bright new talent Pip Jones gives a hilarious, quirky twist to everyday experiences for readers aged 5+.

A Dead Lawyer Eagle Creek, Louisiana. Lawyer Sam Galloway is burned alive in an apparently motiveless attack. The local sheriff's department calls in former FBI profiler Jefferson Winter to consult on the case. A Serial Killer So far there's just one body, but there are going to be more. A deadline has been set, the clock is ticking, and Winter has just thirteen and a half hours to track down the killer, before he strikes again. A Dark Secret Winter knows all about secrets. His father, one of America's most notorious serial killers, had everyone fooled for years. Winter also knows that the problem with secrets is that they have a nasty habit of turning against you when you least expect it.

Edward Snowden, a young computer genius working for America's National Security Agency, blew the whistle on the way this frighteningly powerful organisation uses new technology to spy on the entire planet. The consequences have shaken the leaders of nations worldwide. This is the inside story of Snowden's deeds and the journalists who faced down pressure from the US and UK governments to break a remarkable scoop. From the day he left his glamorous girlfriend in Hawaii, carrying a hard drive full of secrets, to the weeks of secret-spilling in Hong Kong and his battle for asylum, Snowden's story reads like a globe-trotting thriller.

No breath of wind, No gleam of sun Still the white snow Whirls softly down As the day draws to a close, a family prepares for Christmas — decorating the tree, hanging stockings by the fire, putting out a plate of mince pies... Outside, the world turns to white.

George Foss never thought he'd see her again, but on a late-August night in Boston, there she is, in his local bar, Jack's Tavern. When George first met her, she was an eighteen-year-old college freshman from Sweetgum, Florida. She and George became inseparable in their first fall semester, so George was devastated when he got the news that she had committed suicide over Christmas break. But, as he stood in the living room of the girl's grieving parents, he realized the girl in the photo on their mantelpiece — the one who had committed suicide — was not his girlfriend. Later, he discovered the true identity of the girl he had loved — and of the things she may have done to escape her past. Now, twenty years later, she's back, and she's telling George that he's the only one who can help her...

Not everyone who's broken can be fixed. Four victims, all young women, all tortured and then lobotomised. None of them able to tell the police the name of their attacker. None of them able to live normal lives again. Just broken dolls, played with then discarded. Ex-FBI profiler Jefferson Winter is no ordinary investigator. The son of one of America's most renowned serial killers, Winter has spent his life trying to distance himself from his father's legacy. But are they more similar than he can admit? When another young woman goes missing, Winter has to race against the clock to identify the attacker and find the latest victim before it's too late.

Following the sensational success of 1,227 QI Facts to Blow Your Socks Off, the QI team returns with a fresh stack of facts to astonish and enlighten. Pigs suffer from anorexia. Wagner always wore pink silk underwear. Rugby School's first official rugby kit in 1871 included a bow tie. Lord Kitchener had four spaniels called Shot, Bang, Miss and Damn. It is impossible to whistle in a spacesuit. J. K Rowling has no middle name. The first computer mouse was made of wood. If there are any facts you don't believe, or if you want to know more about them, all the sources can be found on QI's website.

In New York City, Isabel Reed, one of the most respected and powerful literary agents in the city, frantically turns the pages of a manuscript into the early dawn hours. This manuscript — printed out, hand-delivered, totally anonymous — is full of shocking revelations and disturbing truths, things which could compromise national security. Is this what she's been waiting for her entire career: a book that will help her move on from a painful past, a book that could save her beloved industry... a book that will change the world? In Copenhagen, Hayden Gray, a veteran station chief, wary of the CIA's obsession with the Middle East, has been steadfastly monitoring the dangers that abound in Europe. Even if his bosses aren't paying attention, he's determined to stay vigilant. And he's also on the trail of this manuscript — and the secrets that lie at its heart. For him, quite simply, it must never see the light of day. As Isabel and Hayden try to outwit each other, the nameless author watches on from afar. With no-one quite sure who holds all the cards, the stakes couldn't be higher: in just twenty-four hours careers could be ruined, devastating secrets could be unearthed, and innocent people could die. Gripping, sophisticated, and impossible to put down, The Accident is a masterful follow-up to one of the most acclaimed and striking debut thrillers of recent years.

Metallica have sold in excess of 100 million albums and won seven Grammys. Their journey from scuzzy Los Angeles garages to the stages of the world's biggest stadia has been an epic and often traumatic one, and one of the few truly great rock 'n' roll sagas. No music writers have been afforded greater access to Metallica over the years than Paul Brannigan and Ian Winwood, two former editors of Kerrang. Having conducted hundreds of hours of interviews with the band, they have between them gained an unparalleled knowledge of the group's history and an insiders' view of how their story has developed: they have ridden in the band's limos, flown on their private jet, joined them in the studio, been invited to the quartet's 'HQ' outside San Francisco and shared beers and stories with them in venues across the globe. There are countless memorable stories about the band never before seen in print, tales of bed-hopping and drug-taking and car-crashes and fist-fights and back-stabbing that occur when you mix testosterone and adrenaline, alcohol and egomania, talent and raw ambition. Perceptive, emotionally attached, and intellectually rigorous, Birth, School, Metallica, Death will be the essential and definitive story of this extraordinary band. Volume I takes us from the band's inception through to the recording and eve of release of their seminal, self-titled, 1991 album.

This is the only in-depth biographical account of the legendary lead singer of Joy Division, written by his widow. It includes a foreword by Jon Savage and an introduction by Joy Division drummer, Steven Morris. Revered by his peers and idolized by his fans, Ian Curtis left behind a legacy rich in artistic genius. Mesmerizing on stage but introverted and prone to desperate mood swings in his private life, Curtis died by his own hand on 18 May 1980. Touching from a Distance documents how, with a wife, child and impending international fame, Curtis was seduced by the glory of an early grave. Regarded as the essential book on the essential icon of the post-punk era, Touching from a Distance includes a full set of Curtis' lyrics and a discography and gig list.

Sulphuric Acid tells the story of a reality TV death camp, which has become the nation's obsession — an amoral spectacle played out through the media. It is a blackly funny and shocking satire on the modern predilection for reality television and celebrity, in which the audience at home develops a taste for blood.

From France's 'literary lioness' (Elle), The Book of Proper Names is the story of the hapless orphan girl, Plectrude. Raised by her aunt, and unaware of the dark secret behind her past, she is a troubled but dreamy child who is both blessed and cursed by her intoxicating eyes. Discovered to have enormous gifts as a dancer, she is accepted at Paris's most prestigious ballet school where she devotes herself to artistic perfection, until her body can take no more. In a brilliantly succinct story of haunted adolescence and lost mothers, Nothomb propels the narrative forward until Plectrude is forced to take command of her own fate.

Pepys Road: an ordinary street in the Capital. Each house has seen its fair share of first steps and last breaths, and plenty of laughter in between. Today, through each letterbox along this ordinary street drops a card with a simple message: We Want What You Have. At forty, Roger Yount is blessed with an expensively groomed wife, two small sons and a powerful job in the City. An annual bonus of a million might seem excessive, but with second homes and nannies to maintain, he's not sure he can get by without it. Elsewhere in the Capital, Zbigniew has come from Warsaw to indulge the super-rich in their interior decoration whims. Freddy Kano, teenage football sensation, has left a two-room shack in Senegal to follow his dream. Traffic warden Quentina has exchanged the violence of the police in Zimbabwe for the violence of the enraged middle classes. For them all, this city offers the chance of a different kind of life. Capital is a post-crash state-of-the nation novel told with compassion and humour, featuring a cast of characters that you will be sad to leave behind.

In an old mansion in Cennethisar, a former fishing village near Istanbul, an old widow Fatma awaits the annual summer visit of her grandchildren. She has lived in the village for decades, ever since her husband, an idealistic young doctor, first arrived to serve the poor fishermen. Now mostly bedridden, she is attended by her faithful servant Recep, a dwarf and the doctor's illegitimate son. They share memories, and grievances, of the early years, before Cennethisar became a high-class resort. Her visiting grandchildren are Faruk, a dissipated failed historian; his sensitive leftist sister, Nilgun; and Metin, a high school student drawn to the fast life of the nouveaux riches, who dreams of going to America. But it is Recep's nephew Hassan, a high-school dropout, lately fallen in with right-wing nationalists, who will draw the visiting family into the growing political cataclysm issuing from Turkey's tumultuous century-long struggle for modernity.

Ryder, a renowned pianist, arrives in a Central European city he cannot identify for a concert he cannot remember agreeing to give. But then as he traverses a landscape by turns eerie and comical — and always strangely malleable, as a dream might be — he comes steadily to realise he is facing the most crucial performance of his life. Ishiguro's extraordinary study of a man whose life has accelerated beyond his control was met on publication by consternation, vilification — and the highest praise.

Since the early 1980s, David Byrne has been riding a bicycle as his principal means of transportation in New York City. A few years later he discovered folding bikes, and starting taking them with him on music tour overseas, and experienced a sense of liberation as he pedalled around many of the world's principal cities. The point of view from his bike seat has given Byrne a panoramic window on urban life over the last thirty years as he has cycled round cities such as London, Berlin, Buenos Aires, Istanbul, Manila, New York, and San Francisco. From music and the visual arts, to globalisation, politics, the nature of creative work, fashion and art, this book gives the reader an incredible insight into what Byrne is seeing and thinking as he pedals around these cities. Filled with intimate photographs, incredible musical stories and a powerful ecological message, this is a enchanting celebration of bike riding — of the rewards of seeing the world at bike level.

The author of The Fortress of Solitude and Motherless Brooklyn now beguiles his readers nine times over into the ironic, heartbroken, eerie and absurd territory he has made forever his own. The nine stories in this collection present characters struggling with loneliness, failed relationships and the consequences of strange powers. Men and Cartoons is a place where superheroes take tenured positions at colleges, where innermost secrets are blurted out in baroque dinner-party games, where a magical spray product reveals that which two tormented lovers have concealed from one another, where sheep bred for suicide defy the imperatives of their creators, and where the smallest moments of life, from fitting a pair of glasses to choosing a record to play during a tryst, become unexpectedly revelatory, uncanny and hilarious. In these nine tales Lethem brings his quarry into the light: men, not boys, caught in the act of never completely growing up.

So announces the narrator of Loving Sabotage, Amelie Nothomb's critically acclaimed novel about a young girl already stripped of illusions. The daughter of diplomats posted to Peking in the mid-seventies, our unnamed narrator charges about her tightly enclosed world on her 'horse' (bicycle) with the dictatorial clarity and loneliness of a warrior-philosopher. 'From puberty onwards', she announces at one point, 'life is just an epilogue'. There, on the asphalt-playground-battlefield, she discovers her first love: six-year-old Elena, her very own coldly indifferent 'Helen of Troy'. But she also learns life's hardest rule: that if she wants to be loved, she must be cruel in return. Poignant, provocative — and often hilarious — Loving Sabotage chronicles one girl's precocious understanding of the struggles and pains of adult life.

The Japanese believe that until the age of three, children are gods, each one an okosama, or 'Lord Child'. On their third birthday they fall from grace and join the rest of mankind. Narrated by a child — from the age of two and a half up until her third birthday — this novel reveals how this fall from grace can be a very difficult thing indeed from which to recover. 'Nothomb potently distils from the state of infancy the intensity of beginnings, the precariousness, the trailed clouds of glory — that grow indistinct as childhood approaches.' New York Times. 'Amélie Nothomb, like an urchin about to pick your pocket, has frighteningly clear eyes and a disarming voice with a wicked snap.' Luc Sante

Set in Peru during the 1950s, Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter is the story of an 18 year old student who falls for a 32 year old divorcee. Mario, an aspiring writer, works at a radio station that broadcasts, live each day, up to a half-dozen short-run soap operas. At the same time that the author meets his «Aunt Julia», the radio station, which had been buying scripts by weight from Cuba, hires a Bolivian scriptwriter named Pedro Camacho to write the serials. The novel chronicles the scriptwriter's rise and fall in tandem with the protagonist's affair.