Faber and Faber

Bobby, holed up in a Middlesbrough tower block, works on his paintings under the influence of pills-on-toast, acid-on-crackers and Francis Bacon. When Bent Lewis, a famous art dealer and mover-shaker from that London appears, Bobby and friends are sent on a sweaty adventure of self-discovery, hedonism and violence involving a 2.5cm-head curved claw hammer. Spanning one dynamite paragraph, Ten Storey Love Song is a ferocious slab of concrete prose peppered with beauty and delivered with glorious abandon.

England, 1930s. Christopher Banks has become the country's most celebrated detective, his cases the talk of London society. Yet one unsolved crime has always haunted him: the mysterious disappearance of his parents, in old Shanghai, when he was a small boy. Moving between London and Shanghai of the inter-war years, WHEN WE WERE ORPHANS is a remarkable story of memory, intrigue and the need to return.

Published to coincide with Rostropovich's 80th birthday celebrations Mstislav Rostropovich, internationally recognised as one of the world's finest cellists and musicians, has always maintained that teaching is an important responsibility for great artists. Before his emigration in 1974 from Russia to the West, Rostropovich taught several generations of the brightest Russian talents — as Professor of the Moscow Conservatoire — over a continuous period of two decades. His students included such artists as Jacqueline du Pre, Nataliyia Gutman, Karine Georgian, Ivan Monighetti and many others Rostropovich's teaching represented not only his individual approach to cello repertoire and instrumental technique, but also comprised a philosophy of life. As soon as he returned from his frequent concert tours, he would launch himself with whirlwind energy into his teaching activities. His lessons, which were conducted as open masterclasses, were awaited eagerly as an event of huge importance. Class 19 of the Moscow Conservatoire, where they were held, was usually packed with students (violinists, conductors and pianists as well as cellists). Often other professors dropped in, as did visiting musicians. The lessons were performances in themselves: Rostropovich — usually seated at the piano — cajoled and inspired his students to give the best of themselves. His comments went far beyond correcting the students in making them understand the essence of the work they were playing. Often this was done through striking imagery, and as such the lessons were addressed to the wider audience present in the classroom as well as to the individual student. Drawing from her own vivid reminiscences and those of ex-students, documents from the Moscow Conservatoire and extensive interviews with Rostropovich himself, Elizabeth Wilson's book sets out to define his teaching, and to recapture the atmosphere of the conservatoire and Moscow's musical life.

The Lacuna is the heartbreaking story of a man's search for safety of a man torn beween the warm heart of Mexico and the cold embrace of 1950s McCarthyite America. Born in the U.S. and reared in Mexico, Harrison Shepherd is a liability to his social-climbing flapper mother, Salome. Making himself useful in the household of the famed Mexican artists Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo, and exiled Bolshevik leader Lev Trotsky, young Shepherd inadvertently casts his lot with art and revolution. A violent upheaval sends him north to a nation newly caught up in World War II. In the mountain city of Asheville, North Carolina he remakes himself in America's hopeful image. 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. A gripping story of identity, loyalty and the devastating power of accusations to destroy innocent people, The Lacuna is as deep and rich as the New World.

In a sublime story cycle, Kazuo Ishiguro explores ideas of love, music and the passing of time. From the piazzas of Italy to the Malvern Hills, a London flat to the 'hush-hush floor' of an exclusive Hollywood hotel, the characters we encounter range from young dreamers to cafe musicians to faded stars, all of them at some moment of reckoning. Gentle, intimate and witty, this quintet is marked by a haunting theme: the struggle to keep alive a sense of life's romance, even as one gets older, relationships flounder and youthful hopes recede.

The young women of Nightingale House are there to learn to nurse and comfort the suffering. But when one of the students plays patient in a demonstration of nursing skills, she is horribly, brutally killed. Another student dies equally mysteriously and it is up to Adam Dalgliesh to unmask a killer who has decided to prescribe murder as the cure for all ills.

An actress dies in shocking circumstances. She leaves behind an unconventional extended family of three who embark on a journey through grief and suffering, memories lost and gained, forbidden romance, redemption and recovery, and a confrontation with spirits on a remote Pacific island.

Leon Trotsky was the charismatic intellectual of the Russian Revolution, an authoritarian organizer, who might have succeeded Lenin and become the ruler of the Soviet Union. But by the time the Second World War broke out he was in exile, living in Mexico in a villa borrowed from the great artists Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo, guarded only by several naive young American acolytes. The household was awash with emotional turmoil — tensions grew between Trotsky and Rivera, as questions arose over his relations with Frida Kahlo. His wife was restless and jealous. Outside of the villa, Mexican communists tried to storm the house, the Trotskys' sons were being persecuted and killed in Europe, and in Moscow, Stalin personally ordered his secret police to kill his fiercest left-wing critic — at any cost. By the summer of 1940, they had found a man who could penetrate the tight security around the house in far-away Mexico... Bertrand Patenaude's book reconstructs a famous state crime with chilling precision and a page-turning quality. It tells the amazing story of a deadly rivalry, revolutionary fanaticism and tragic violence and loss.

Baba Yaga is an old hag who lives in a house built on chicken legs and kidnaps small children. She is one of the most pervasive and powerful creatures in all mythology. But what does she have to do with a writer's journey to Bulgaria in 2007 on behalf of her mother? Or with a trio of old women who decide to spend a week together at a hotel spa?

In 1788 Daniel Rooke sets out on a journey that will change the course of his life. As a lieutenant in the First Fleet, he lands on the wild and unknown shores of New South Wales. There he sets up an observatory to chart the stars. But this country will prove far more revelatory than the stars above. Based on real events, The Lieutenant tells the unforgettable story of Rooke's connection with an Aboriginal child — a remarkable friendship that resonates across the oceans and the centuries.

Spanning Tom Waits' extraordinary 40-year career, from Closing Time to Orphans, Lowside of the Road is Barney Hoskyns' unique take on one of rock's great enigmas. Like Bob Dylan and Neil Young, Waits is a chameleonic survivor who's achieved long-term success while retaining cult credibility and outsider mystique. From his perilous jazzbo years in '70s Los Angeles to the multiple-Grammy winner of recent years — by way of such shape-shifting '80s albums as Swordfish trombones — this exhaustive biography charts Waits' life step-by-step and album-by-album. Affectionate and penetrating, and based on a combination of assiduous research and deep critical insight, this is an outstanding investigation of a notoriously private artist and performer — the definitive account to date of Tom Waits' life and work.

Yes, Minister, and the equally successful sequel Yes, Prime Minister captured a niche in the political consciousness of the nation. First broadcast thirty years ago, the original writers of these classic series have reunited to create a bang up to date Yes, Prime Minister for the stage. Spin, blackberries, sexed-up dossiers, sleaze, global warming and a country on the brink of financial meltdown form the backdrop to mayhem at Chequers as the Foreign Minister of Kumranistan makes a seriously compromising offer of salvation. Prime Minister Jim Hacker remains in power with his coterie of close advisors including Cabinet Secretary Sir Humphrey Appleby and Principal Private Secretary Bernard Woolley, but for how long? They govern a whole new world. Yes, Prime Minister premiered in the Festival Theatre, Chichester, in May 2010.

Meet Willy G. Christmas, a brilliant, troubled and altogether original poet-saint from Brooklyn, and Mr Bones, his canine sidekick. Together they embark on one last great adventure together, heading to Baltimore in search of Willy's beloved mentor Bea Swanson — who used to know him as William Gurevitch, son of Polish war refugees. But is she still alive?

Cats! Some are sane, some are mad and some are good and some are bad. You can meet magical Mr Mistoffelees, sleepy Old Deuteronomy and curious Rum Tum Tugger. But you'll be lucky to meet Macavity because Macavity's not there! In 1925 T.S. Eliot became co-director of Faber & Faber, who remain his publishers to this day. Throughout the 1930s he composed the now famous poems about Macavity, Old Deuteronomy, Mr Mistoffelees and many other cats, under the name of 'Old Possum'. In 1981 Eliot's poems were set to music by Andrew Lloyd Webber as Cats which went on to become the longest-running Broadway musical in history. This charming new edition contains original colour illustrations by the award-winning illustrator of The Gruffalo, Axel Scheffler.

When Nikos, a detective in the final years of his career, is persuaded back to his home town he is faced with the gory murder of a young boy near the old monastery. Echoing two murders committed 33 years previously in the exact same spot, and a mass cult suicide, it brings back a part of the island`s history that it has tried hard to forget. There is a lot at stake — the island`s lucrative tourist trade and the open secret of the drugs trade that goes hand in hand with the hordes of mainly young British holidaymakers.

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.

It is the time of the Great Terror. Inspector Pekkala — known as the Emerald Eye — was the most famous detective in all Russia. He was the favourite of the Tsar. Now he is the prisoner of the men he once hunted. Like millions of others, he has been sent to the gulags in Siberia and, as far as the rest of the world is concerned, he is as good as dead. But a reprieve comes when he is summoned by Stalin himself to investigate a crime. His mission — to uncover the men who really killed the Tsar and his family, and to locate the Tsar's treasure. The reward for success will be his freedom and the chance to re-unite with a woman he would have married if the Revolution had not torn them apart. The price of failure — death. Set against the backdrop of the paranoid and brutal country that Russia became under the rule of Stalin, Eye of the Red Tsar introduces a compelling new figure to readers of crime fiction.

Raised in isolated privilege by his New York grandmother, Che, the precocious son of 60s radicals, just wants to see his parents. But first he must become an outlaw himself, fleeing to a hippy commune in the jungle of tropical Queensland, where he is forced to slowly, bravely, confront his life. His Illegal Self is an achingly beautiful and emotional story of the love between a young woman and a little boy, and a wonderful journey of self-discovery.

Inglourious Basterds is set during World War II and stars Brad Pitt, Mike Myers and Diane Kruger. A band of Jewish-American soldiers known as 'The Basterds' spread fear throughout the Third Reich by scalping and brutally killing Nazis, while in Paris a young Jewish French woman who runs a movie theatre is involved in a plot to kill Hitler during the premiere of a movie. Inglorious Basterds has the violence, humour, cracking dialogue, and band-of-brothers comaraderie of Reservoir Dogs, as well as the profound courage and sense of honour of the greatest World War II movies. Once again, Quentin Tarantino has created an unforgettable movie experience.

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...

Venetia Aldridge QC is a distinguished barrister. When she agrees to defend Garry Ashe, accused of the brutal murder of his aunt, it is one more opportunity to triumph in her career as a criminal lawyer. But just four weeks later, Miss Aldridge is found dead. Commander Adam Dalgliesh, called in to investigate, finds motives for murder among the clients Venetia has defended, her professional colleagues, her family — even her lover. As Dalgliesh narrows the field of suspects, a second brutal murder draws them into greater complexities of intrigue and evil.

A piercing scream, shattering the evening calm, brings Superintendent Adam Dalgliesh hurrying from his literary party to the nearby Steen Psychiatric Clinic, where he discovers the body of a woman sprawled on the basement floor, a chisel thrust through her heart. As Dalgliesh probes beneath the apparently unruffled calm of the clinic, he discovers that many an intrigue lies hidden behind the Georgian terrace's unassuming facade. Professionally, he has never known the taste of failure. Now, for the first time, he feels unsure of his own mastery as he battles to unmask a cool killer who is proving to be his intellectual equal, and who is poised to strike again.

An Adam Dalgliesh Mystery Commander Dalgliesh is recuperating from a life-threatening illness when he receives a call for advice from an elderly friend who works as a chaplain in a home for the disabled on the Dorset coast. Dalgliesh arrives to discover that Father Baddeley has recently and mysteriously died, as has one of the patients at Toynton Grange. Evidently the home is not quite the caring community it purports to be. Dalgliesh is determined to discover the truth of his friend's death, but further fatalities follow and his own life is in danger as he unmasks the evil at the heart of Toynton Grange. More expertise from P. D. James. The writing is excellent, the pitch of final terror beautifully sustained — Evening Standard. She writes like an angel. Every character is clearly drawn. Her atmosphere is unerringly, chillingly convincing. And she manages all this without for a moment slowing down the drive and tension of an exciting mystery — Marcel Berlins, The Times.

Twentieth-century history has thrown up a few sinister characters stranger and more cruel than Baron Ungern-Sternberg, but not many, and only he conquered a country with a cavalry army — the last person in history to do so — in the in the age of the aeroplane and the tank. This violent, anti-Semitic fanatic took over Mongolia in 1919 with a ragtag force of White Russians, Siberians, Japanese and native Mongolians. He dreamed of creating a huge horse army with which he would retake Moscow and install a new despotic Tsar. Some saw him as a promised reincarnation of Genghis Khan who would restore the greatness of the Mongolian Empire. This is an epic story, which moves from the Baltic through the vastness of Russia to Siberia and the Mongolian steppe. Ungern was born into the German aristocracy, descendants of the Teutonic Knights, which ruled the Baltic region under the Tsars. Ejected from his regiment for violence and instability, he found himself when he was posted to the Russian Far East before the First World War. He had already found his way to the cocktail of mystical beliefs and esoteric knowledge that was common among people of his class. Now he found Mongolian Buddhism, a very different creed from the doctrine of peace and love we associate with followers of the Buddha. Its hells and vengefulness chimed with his already extreme hatred of Jews, liberals and Bolsheviks. The aftermath of the war, in which he fought with reckless bravery, saw Ungern in the Far East leading a wild bunch of counter-revolutionaries. James Palmer describes his spiral into ever darker obsessions, and evermore cruel treatment of enemies. This was Mr Kurtz on horseback, covered in amulets and animal skins, leading a straggling horde of desperate men. In the end, Trotsky, then in charge of the Red Army, sent a formidable force against them. James Palmer does full justice to this barely believable story of a man who foreshadowed the Nazis in his combination of mysticism and genocidal violence, and he explains Ungern’s strange religious beliefs and the culture of Mongolia, of which this adventurer became, for a brief period, the absolute ruler.