Faber and Faber

Aurelio Zen is posted to Calabria, where in the heart of a tight-knit traditional community there has been a brutal murder. Zen is determined to find a way to penetrate the code of silence and uncover the truth. But his mission is complicated by another secret which has drawn strangers from the other side of the world — a hunt for buried treasure launched by a single-minded player with millions to spend pursuing his bizarre and deadly obsession.

Che is raised in isolated privilege by his New York grandmother, precocious son of radical Harvard students in the sixties. Yearning for his famous outlaw parents, denied all access to television and the news, he takes hope from his long haired teenage neighbour who predicts they will come for you, man. They'll break you out of here. Soon Che too is an outlaw, fleeing down subways, abandoning seedy motels at night, as he is pitched into a journey that leads him to a hippy commune in the jungle of tropical Queensland. Here he slowly, bravely, confronts his life, learning that nothing is what it seems. «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.

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.

Narrated by the twin voices of the artist Butcher Bones, and his 'damaged two-hundred-and-twenty-pound brother' Hugh, «Theft: A Love Story» once again displays Peter Carey's extraordinary flair for language. Ranging from the rural wilds of Australia to Manhattan via Tokyo, it is a brilliant and moving exploration of art, fraud, responsibility and redemption.

Is Santa Claus really a magic mushroom in disguise? Was Alice in Wonderland a thinly veiled psychedelic mushroom odyssey? Did mushroom tea kick-start ancient Greek philosophy? This book tells the story of how hallucinogenic mushrooms, once shunned in the West as the most pernicious of poisons, came to be the illicit drug of choice.

Documents Daniel Kalder`s travels in the bizarre and mysterious worlds of Russia`s ethnic republics.

Yashim is no ordinary detective. Yashim is a eunuch. A concubine is strangled in the Sultans palace harem, and a young cadet is found butchered in the streets of Istanbul. Delving deep into the citys crooked alleyways, and deeper still into its tumultuous past, Yashim discovers that some people will go to any lengths to preserve the traditions of the Ottoman Empire. Brilliantly evoking Istanbul in the 1830s, «The Janissary Tree» is a bloody, witty and fast-paced literary thriller with a spectacular cast.

Presents an off-road safari through a hundred interesting members of the animal kingdom, with illustrations and diagrams. This title covers: the water bears that can live in suspension for hundreds of years, the parasite carried by your cat that makes men grumpy and women promiscuous, and the woodlouse that drinks through its bottom.

Imagine an edition of «The Guinness Book of Records» selected by a panel of stand-up comedians. This work is packed with original contributions from Stephen Fry, Alan Davies, Jo Brand, Bill Bailey and other regular guests on the show, with games to play at home, puzzles, cartoon strips, mini-encyclopaedias, how-to diagrams and masses of QI facts.

An atmospheric mystery set in St Petersburg in the winter of 1867 sees detective Porfiry Petrovich taking his first murder case since Dostoevsky's «Crime and Punishment». When two frozen bodies are found in a park, he begins to suspect that the truth may be more complex than others wish him to believe, as his investigations lead him to a shocking discovery which reveals the city's darkest secrets. «A Gentle Axe» is utterly absorbing and tense from its dramatic opening through to its shocking climax.

It's the year 1793, and Hanno Stiffeniis is a magistrate in Prussia. He has been called to investigate a spate of murders which has reduced the city to a state of terror, under the watchful gaze of his mentor, Kant. Four people have died, and there is no sign of an end to the killing spree. When the killer tries to murder him, the magistrate finds himself confronted by the demons of his own past. Therein lies the sinister source of those murders, and the true reason he has been enticed back to Konigsberg... Hugely atmospheric, entertaining and intelligent, Critique of Criminal Reason is the first in a series of compelling crime novels set in Prussia featuring Hanno Steffeniis.

When an English priest takes over a small Scottish parish, not everyone is ready to accept him. He makes friends with two local youths, Mark and Lisa, and clashes with a world he can barely understand. The town seems to grow darker each night. Fate comes calling and before the summer is out his quiet life is the focus of public hysteria. Meanwhile a religious war is unfolding on his doorstep... Be Near Me is a brilliantly moving story of art and politics, love and change and the way we live now.

Opens in 1944, as the women of a small Welsh farming community wake one morning to find that their husbands have gone. Soon after that a German patrol arrives in their valley.

»Ivan's War» is the first book to put the experience of the ordinary Russian soldier at the heart of a narrative of the war on the Eastern Front, displacing the dictators and their generals who have dominated books on the subject for the past sixty years. Ivan, the archetypal Russian infantryman, emerges at last as a human figure in Catherine Merridale's magnificent and hugely acclaimed new work.

Kathy, Ruth and Tommy were pupils at Hailsham — an idyllic establishment situated deep in the English countryside. The children there were tenderly sheltered from the outside world, brought up to believe they were special, and that their personal welfare was crucial. But for what reason were they really there? It is only years later that Kathy, now aged 31, finally allows herself to yield to the pull of memory and try to make sense of the past. What unfolds is an extraordinarily powerful story in which Kathy, Ruth and Tommy slowly come to realise that it is their seemingly happy childhood that has haunted them ever since, even tainting their adult lives. Part love story, part mystery, «Never Let Me Go» is a uniquely beautiful and troubling novel, charged throughout with a profound emotional depth.

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.

Philippa Palfrey, adopted as a child, believes herself to be the motherless, illegitimate daughter of an aristocratic father. At eighteen she exercises her right to find out the truth. What she discovers will change her life forever. Philippa enters a new and terrifying world and soon comes to realize that she is not the only one interested in her parents' whereabouts.

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.

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.

Hired to protect a beautiful but neurotic actress, Cordelia Gray soon becomes embroiled in a case as dangerous to her own life as it is mysterious. Clarissa Lisle hopes to make a spectacular comeback in a production of The Duchess of Malfi, to be played in Ambrose Gorringe's sinister castle at Courcy Island. Cordelia is there to ensure her safety following the appearance of a number of poison-pen letters. But it soon becomes clear that all are in danger. Trapped within the walls of the Gothic Castle, the treacherous past of the island re-emerges, and everyone seems to have a motive for sending Clarissa 'down, down the hell'.

Meet Cordelia Gray: twenty-two, tough, intelligent and now sole inheritor of the Pryde Detective Agency. Her first assignment finds her hired by Sir Ronald Callender to investigate the death of his son Mark, a young Cambridge student found hanged in mysterious circumstances. Required to delve into the hidden secrets of the Callender family, Cordelia soon realizes it is not a case of suicide, and that the truth is entirely more sinister.

Superintendent Adam Dalgliesh had been looking forward to a quiet holiday at his aunt's cottage on Monksmere Head, one of the furthest-flung spots on the remote Suffolk coast. With nothing to do other than enjoy long wind-swept walks, tea in front of the crackling wood fire and hot buttered toast, Dalgliesh was relishing the thought of a well-earned break. However, all hope of peace is soon shattered by murder. The mutilated body of a local crime writer, Maurice Seaton, floats ashore in a drifting dinghy to drag Adam Dalgliesh into a new and macabre investigation.

Tells the story of Galip, an Istanbul lawyer whose wife has vanished. Playing the part of private investigator, he soon finds himself descending deeper and deeper into an extraordinary mystery.

Mrs Rooney, old and unwieldy, is dragging herself towards the railway station on a Saturday lunchtime to meet her blind husband on his way back from the office, and guide him home. She passes the time of day with a man with a dung cart, and a man with a bicycle. A third man with a motor car offers her a lift. A church-struck spinster helps her up the station steps... All That Fall, specially commissioned by the BBC and first broadcast on the Third Programme in 1957, was immediately and universally acclaimed for its comic and linguistic exuberance.