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The first novel by Jonathan Lethem (author of the award-winning Motherless Brooklyn) is a science-fiction mystery, a dark and funny post-modern romp serving further evidence that Lethem is the distinctive voice of a new generation. Conrad Metcalf has problems. He has a monkey on his back, a rabbit in his waiting room, and a trigger-happy kangaroo on his tail. (Maybe evolution therapy is not such a good idea). He's been shadowing Celeste, the wife of an Oakland urologist. Maybe falling in love with her a little at the same time. When the doctor turns up dead, Metcalf finds himself caught in a crossfire between the boys from the Inquisitor's Office and gangsters who operate out of the back room of the Fickle Muse.

Girl in Landscape offers a genre-bending, mind-expanding tale of a new frontier. Jonathan Lethem's novel is a science-fiction Western that evokes both the brooding tragedy of John Ford's The Searchers and the sexual precocity of Nabokov's Lolita.Lethem's heroine is 14-year-old Pella Marsh, whose mother dies just as her family flees a post-apocalyptic Brooklyn for the frontier of a recently discovered planet. Hating her ineffectual father, and troubled by a powerful attraction to the virile but dangerous loner who holds sway over the little colony, Pella embarks on a course of discovery that will have tragic and irrevocable consequences - both for the humans in her community, and also for the mysterious and passive indigenous inhabitants, The Archbuilders.

What if your lover left you for nothing? Literally Nothing? From the author of Motherless Brooklyn, this is a strange, hilarious love story about a man, a woman, and the space between them. Physicist Alice Coombs has made a great discovery - a hole in the universe, a true nothingness she and her colleagues call 'Lack'. Professor Philip Engstrand has made his own breakthrough - he realises how much he loves Alice. Trouble is, Lack is a void with a personality - a void that utterly obsesses Philip's beloved. She's fallen out of love with Philip and in love with Lack.

Jonathan Lethem, acclaimed author of The Fortress of Solitude and Motherless Brooklyn, here takes the reader on a road trip through a post-apocalyptic USA.Since the war came and the bombs fell, Hatfork, Wyoming, has been a broken-down, mutant-ridden town. Young Chaos lives in the projection booth of the abandoned multiplex cinema, trying to blot out his present, but unable to remember his past. Then, over a can of dog food, the local tyrant Kellogg reveals to Chaos that those bombs never actually fell. The truth, in fact, is a little more complicated . . .So Chaos gets behind the wheel of an automobile and, accompanied by a fur-covered mutant female, sets out onto the empty highway for a journey to the edge of his American nightmare: in search of a missing identity and a stolen love.

Muqtada al-Sadr's men are killing more British troops than any other group in the world today. Cleric, militia leader and fiercely anti-American politician, Muqtada's combination of nationalism and religious fervour appealed to countless angry and impoverished Shias, and as US control of Iraq disintegrates, the likelihood increases that he will assume total power in the Shia areas of the country.In a compelling narrative, award winning war correspondent Patrick Cockburn charts Muqtada's rise to power, his links with Hizbullah and the Iranians; and his confrontation with the American and British military. Cockburn has reported from Iraq since the 1970s (often at great personal risk), and combines first hand accounts of his investigations into Muqtada with vivid and dismaying reportage of the civil war now raging in a fractured country.

Love it or loathe it, few would disagree that the music of Harrison Birtwistle stands amongst the most assured, original and challenging music ever to have been produced by a British composer. While for some the uncompromisingly modernist surface of his music can be an obstacle to closer acquaintance, for others, it is Birtwistle's articulation of deep aspects of the human psyche that continues to excite and fascinate. In this book, Jonathan Cross - a leading commentator on contemporary music - aims to uncover the sources of Birtwistle's thinking, and to present a critical account of his musical, dramatic and aesthetic preoccupations through an examination of such topics as theatre, myth, ritual, pastoral, pulse and line. He offers a range of contexts within which the music can be understood so that the curious and the initiated alike may be drawn towards new and enriching experiences of the extraordinarily powerful music of Harrison Birtwistle.

Darwin and the Barnacle by Rebecca Stott, lavishly illustrated and superbly told, is the fascinating story of how genius sometimes proceeds through indirection - and how one small item of curiosity contributed to history's most spectacular scientific breakthrough.

The event that changed all of their lives happened on a Saturday afternoon in June, just minutes after Michael Turner - thinking the Nelsons' house was empty - stepped through their back door.After the sudden loss of his wife, Michael Turner moves to London and quickly develops a close friendship with the Nelson family next door. Josh, Samantha and their two young daughters seem to represent everything Michael fears he may now never have: intimacy, children, stability and a family home. Despite this, the new friendship at first seems to offer the prospect of healing, but then a catastrophic event changes everything. Michael is left bearing a burden of grief and a secret he must keep, but the truth can only be kept at bay for so long.Moving from London and New York to the deserts of Nevada, I Saw a Man is a brilliant exploration of violence, guilt and attempted redemption, written with the pace and grip of a thriller. Owen Sheers takes the reader from close observation of the domestic sphere to some of the most important questions and dilemmas of the contemporary world.

Ever since her sister, Agnes, died, Pearl has a tradition every time it snows. She makes a person out of snow. A snow sister. It makes Christmas feel a little less lonely.On Christmas Eve, her father receives a letter about a long-lost relative's will. Is their luck about to change? In anticipation of a better Christmas, Pearl goes to beg credit at Mr Noble's grocery to get ingredients for a Christmas pudding. But she is refused, and chased down the street where she is hit by a handsome cab. The snow is falling so hard that they can't take her home. She'll have to stay at Flintfield Manor overnight, in a haunted room... Will Pearl make it home for Christmas?

A Pulitzer Prize-winning author's revelatory celebration of the novel - at once an anatomy of the art of fiction, a guide for readers and writers and a memoir of literary life. Over her 20 year career, Jane Smiley has written many kinds of novels - mystery, comedy, historical fiction, epic. But when her impulse to write faltered after 9/11, she decided to approach novels from a different angle: she read 100 of them, from the 1000-year-old Tale of Genji to the recent bestseller White Teeth by Zadie Smith, from classics to little-known gems. With these books and her experience of reading them as her reference, Smiley discusses the pleasure of reading; why a novel succeeds - or doesn't; and how the form has changed over time. She delves into the character of the novelist and reveals how (and which) novels have affected her own life.

'The best biography of Swift to date.' Michael Foot, Observer'David Nokes's book is splendid.' Denis Donoghue, London Review of BooksDavid Nokes presents a gripping and authoritative portrait of Swift in his multifarious roles as satirist, politician, churchman and friend. Drawing on the most recent scholarship, he seeks in particular to re-establish a proper balance between Swift's public and private lives.'Some books give the reader an immediate sense of confidence in the author and this admirable new biography of Swift is one of them.' Yorkshire Post'Should remain the standard one-volume Life for years to come.' New York Times

'You're telling me there are fairies in this wood?' When Alice's brother gets a longed-for chance for a heart transplant, Alice is suddenly bundled off to her estranged grandmother's house. There's nothing good about staying with Nell, except for the beautiful Darkling Wood at the end of her garden - but Nell wants to have it cut down. Alice feels at home there, at peace, and even finds a friend, Flo. But Flo doesn't seem to go to the local school and no one in town has heard of a girl with that name. When Flo shows Alice the surprising secrets of Darkling Wood, Alice starts to wonder, what is real? And can she find out in time to save the wood from destruction?

'I wrote my thesis because it seemed incredible that a nineteenth century cleric could believe that paintings had the power to civilise his community of London's poorest. Yet that is what he did believe and his ideas were exported round the world. I still don't know whether he was right...' Frances BorzelloWhat is the purpose of art? Aside from aesthetic considerations, does it have socio-political functions? Art critic Frances Borzello reflected on this in her doctoral thesis, later expanded for publication in 1987 as Civilising Caliban. Therein she traced a link between Victorian-era exhibitions mounted for Whitechapel's poor by Anglican vicar Samuel Barnett to the munificent post-war patronage of the Arts Council. In a new preface to this edition Borzello reflects on how the idea of 'art for all' has fared - along with the questions of who pays for it and what good it achieves.

James Hamilton-Paterson's first collection of stories was published in 1986: in a prefatory note the author claims inspiration from the 'putative memory' of a Cynic philosopher whose 'brilliant crabbiness' saw him exiled to the foothills of the titular Mount Dog. The collection that follows is a disquietingly humorous volume which tilts the reader's perception of the world just sufficiently as to make the bizarre seem ordinary and the mundane utterly extraordinary.What is happening in a world where a 41-year-old scriptwriter who despises sport becomes the greatest athlete who ever lived, and the Virgin Mary tangles with the Peace Corps? From England to the Philippines, from the Middle East to South America, the stories contained herein portray a world far stranger and less governed than we might care to admit.

The Bell-Boy was James Hamilton-Paterson's third novel, first published in 1990.'Somewhere on my tropical travels I encountered a rickety hotel on whose roof an ancient servant lived in a converted hen coop. This gave me the idea for a young bell-boy, Laki, who is up from the provinces and lives on top of his hotel in the holy city of Malomba. He moonlights as a shrewd guide for foreign visitors, his latest clients being a hippie English family who are in Malomba for psychic surgery. Their mutual exploitation leads to both farce and minor tragedy.' James Hamilton-Paterson'A brilliant religious satire with elements of E.F. Benson and Evelyn Waugh... Few books since E.M. Forster's A Passage to India (whose formal perfection this novel shares) have conveyed more intensely the allure (and the revulsion) the East holds for Westerners.' New York Times

A Very Personal War, first published in 1971, was James Hamilton-Paterson's first non-fiction book, and though out of print for many years it retains its force and relevance today.'In 1969 my agent called me into his office to meet a mysterious man who wanted his story told. He was Cornelius Hawkridge, who had escaped from Hungary during the 1956 uprising and had gone to America. He had recently returned from Vietnam, where for some years he had been conducting a bull-headed one-man investigation into the wholesale theft in South East Asia of US construction material, the corrupt practices of major US contractors supplying the military, and an international money-changing scam... But few wished to know: any negative news about the war in Vietnam qualified as 'rocking the boat'... In 1970 I holed up with him on the island of Gozo for some weeks while he told his story.' James Hamilton-Paterson

Martin Frost sets out for a country house to write his novel away from the distractions of the city. Thinking that he is the sole occupant of the house, he is surprised and annoyed when he discovers a young woman in residence. She is similarly disturbed by his presence. They begin a passionate affair, which reaches an intriguing climax when he has to choose between his life and his art. Written and directed by Paul Auster, The Inner Life of Martin Frost shows him at his mesmerizing best, juggling fiction and reality. The film stars David Thewlis (from Mike Leigh's Naked), Irene Jacob (The Double Life of Veronique), Michael Imperioli (The Sopranos), and Sophie Auster (Lulu on the Bridge), and joins Paul Auster's other much-loved works of cinema, such as Smoke and Blue in the Face.

Of the countries that remained neutral during the Second World War, none was more controversial than Ireland, with accusations of betrayal and hypocrisy poisoning the media. Whereas previous histories of Ireland in the war years have focused on high politics, That Neutral Island brings to life the atmosphere of a country forced to live under rationing, heavy censorship and the threat of invasion. It unearths the motivations of those thousands who left Ireland to fight in the British forces and shows how ordinary people tried to make sense of the Nazi threat through the lens of antagonism towards Britain.

In 1797, Lucia, a beautiful statesman's daughter was married off to a powerful Venetian, only to be caught up in the turbulence of Napoleon's march. This is her story, from dazzling young hostess in Habsburg Vienna, lady-in-waiting at the court of Prince Eugene de Beauharnais in Milan, single mother in Paris during the fall of Napoleon's Empire to Byron's hard-fisted landlady during the poet's stay in Venice.

This collection of Paul Auster screenplays brings together the film work of a writer whose novels have earned him the reputation as 'one of America's most spectacularly inventive writers.' (Times Literary Supplement) Auster has also brought this sense of restless invention to the art of screenwriting, producing Smoke, Blue in the Face, Lulu on the Bridge and The Inner Life of Martin Frost.The prize-winning Smoke tells the story of a novelist, a cigar store manager, and a black teenager who unexpectedly cross paths and end up changing each other's lives in indelible ways. Set in contemporary Brooklyn, Smoke directly inspired Blue in the Face, a largely improvised comedy shot in a total of six days.Lulu on the Bridge is both a thriller and a fairy tale: when jazz musician Izzy Maurer is accidentally hit by a bullet during a performance in a New York club, he is led on a journey into the strange and sometimes frightening labyrinth of his soul. The Inner Life of Martin Frost follows the mysterious and unsettling experiences that befall writer Martin Frost when he borrows a friend's country house and sets out to write a story about elusive and impossible love.The volume also contains production notes, as well as interviews with Paul Auster about his work in film.

The figure of the young American poet living in Paris is familiar from Paul Auster's celebrated novels; here that character is realised in Auster's own stunningly accomplished verse. His penetrating and charged poetry resembles little else in recent American literature. This collection of his poems, translations, and composition notes from early in his career furnish yet further evidence of his literary mastery. Taut, densely lyrical and everywhere informed by a powerful and subtle music, this selection begins with the compact verse fragments of Spokes (written when Auster was in his early twenties) and Unearth, continues on through the more ample meditations of Wall Writing, Disappearances, Effigies, Fragments From the Cold, Facing the Music, and White Spaces, then moves further back in time to include Auster's revealing translations of many of the French poets who influenced his own writing - including Paul Eluard, Andr, Breton, Tristan Tzara, Philippe Soupault, Robert Desnos and Ren, Char - as well as the provocative and previously unpublished 'Notes From A Composition Book' (1967). An introduction by Norman Finkelstein connects biographical elements to a consideration of the work, and takes in Auster's early literary and philosophical influences. For those interested in Paul Auster's novels - the now-classic New York Trilogy or The Brooklyn Follies - this book is an invaluable opportunity to witness his early development.Powerful, sometimes haunting, cool, precise and limpid, this view from the past to the present will appeal to those unfamiliar with this aspect of Auster's work, as well as those already acquainted with his poetry. Readers will agree that Auster's grasp on language and the world around him is not only questioning, but mysterious and very human, perceptive, and deeply compelling

WINNER OF THE BAILEYS WOMEN'S PRIZE FOR FICTIONWINNER OF THE DESMOND ELLIOTT PRIZEKERRY GROUP IRISH NOVEL OF THE YEAR AWARDWINNER OF THE GOLDSMITHS PRIZEEimear McBride's award-winning debut novel tells the story of a young woman's relationship with her brother, and the long shadow cast by his childhood brain tumour. It is a shocking and intimate insight into the thoughts, feelings and chaotic sexuality of a vulnerable and isolated protagonist. To read A Girl is a Half-formed Thing is to plunge inside its narrator's head, experiencing her world at first hand. This isn't always comfortable - but it is always a revelation.

The brain builds a narrative to steady us from moment to moment, but it is absolutely an illusion. There is no me, there is no you, and there is certainly no self.Princeton, New Jersey. 1955. Thomas Stoltz Harvey performs the autopsy on Albert Einstein - and then steals his brain.Bath, England. 1953. Henry undergoes pioneering brain surgery. The surgery changes Henry's life, and the history of neuroscience.London, England. The Present. Martha is a clinical neuropsychologist. When her marriage breaks down she starts to make radically different choices.Three interwoven stories exploring the nature of identity and how we are defined by what we remember, Incognito is an exhilarating exploration of what it means to be human.Nick Payne's Incognito premiered at Live Theatre, Newcastle, in April 2014 in a co-production with nabokov and HighTide Festival Theatre.

A young video shop assistant exchanges the home comforts of one mother-figure for a fleeting sexual encounter with another; a brother and sister find themselves at the bottom of a coal mine with a Japanese tourist; a Welsh stag on a debauched weekend in Dublin confesses an unimaginable truth; and a twice-widowed pensioner tries to persuade the lovely Mrs Morgan to be his date at the town's summer festival... Set in Caerphilly, a diminished castle town in South Wales, Thomas Morris' debut collection reveals its treasures in unexpected ways, offering vivid and moving glimpses of the lost, lonely and bemused. By turns poignant, witty, tender and bizarre - these entertaining stories detail the lives of people who know where they are, but don't know what they're doing. This is the work of a young writer with a startlingly fresh voice, an uncanny ear for dialogue and a broad emotional range. We Don't Know What We're Doing is a major launch for the Faber fiction list in 2015.

1919 saw the publication of two major polemical works: The Economic Consequences of the Peace by John Maynard Keynes and Democratic Ideals and Reality by Halford J. Mackinder. The former is famous, the latter much less so - but it was its own way a prophetic book. Mackinder's message, his warning - addressed to the peacemakers at Versailles - was memorably summarized thus: 'Who Rules East Europe commands the Heartland: / Who rules the Heartland commands the World-Island: / Who rules the World-Island commands the World.' Mackinder contended that power was shifting from the sea-borne empires to countries that encompassed the great land masses: Eastern Europe he designated as 'the geographical pivot of history.' His thesis made a notable impression on German geopolitician Karl Haushofer who was keenly read, in turn, by Hitler. But Democratic Ideals and Reality has endured as a critical study of imperial ambitions and geographical realities.

'Griselda de Reptonville did not know what love was until she joined one of Mrs. Hatch's famous house parties at Beams, and there met Leander...'The Late Breakfasters (1964) was the sole novel Robert Aickman published in his lifetime. Its heroine Griselda is invited to a grand country house where a political gathering is to be addressed by the Prime Minister, followed by an All Party Dance. Expecting little, Griselda instead meets the love of her life. But their fledgling closeness is cruelly curtailed, and for Griselda life then becomes a quest to recapture the wholeness and happiness she felt all too briefly.'Those, if any, who wish to know more about me' - Aickman wrote in 1965 - 'should plunge beneath the frivolous surface of The Late Breakfasters.' Opening as a comedy of manners, its playful seriousness slowly fades into an elegiac variation on the great Greek myth of thwarted love.

After Robert Aickman's death in 1981 the manuscript of The Model, a wintry rococo fable set in Czarist Russia, was located among his papers. Aickman had told a friend he considered this novella to be 'one of the best things I have ever written, if not the very best.' It was duly published for the first time in 1987.The Model tells of Elena, a grave girl inclined to losing herself in dreams of becoming a student ballerina orcoryphee. Her dolour darkens further when she learns she is to be sold into marital slavery by her father so as to settle the family's debts. Refusing an unendurable future she sets out to the city of Smorevsk to pursue her dream. First, however, she must traverse a landscape crowded by highly curious characters and creatures.'A must for Aickman fans... A model of eloquent elegant enchantment.' Robert Bloch (Psycho)

'A masterpiece which delights from first page to last.' TLS'Very clever, very funny and very bold.' Victoria Glendinning, TimesBorn in 1894 to a well-off military family, Gerard Brenan was expected to follow the family tradition. But at Radley school he discovered a love of books and an urge to break the mould, which led him to abscond to Europe for six months. After the First World War he went to Spain, where he found the inspiration for his life's work (and began an affair with Dora Carrington.) Come the 1930s his life changed again, with marriage and the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War, which inspired his masterpiece The Spanish Labyrinth (1943).Drawing on long personal acquaintance as well as a wealth of unpublished correspondence, Jonathan Gathorne-Hardy looks unflinchingly at the whole of this remarkable man of letters - from his venturesome spirit to his troublesome sexuality to his literary accomplishment.'By no means unworthy to stand beside P N Furbank's Forster, Michael Holroyd's Strachey or Quentin Bell's Woolf... Affectionate but acerbic, learned but witty, elegant but relaxed, [Gathorne-Hardy] entertains as consistently as he informs.' Independent on Sunday

'Pictures of perfection make me sick and wicked,' Jane Austen wrote to her niece Fanny Knight a few months before she died. Yet most traditional accounts of Austen's life have insisted on portraying her as just such a picture of perfection. In his 1997 biography David Nokes re-examined Austen, and presented a far richer and livelier picture of the woman who once wrote in another of her letters, 'If I am a wild beast, I cannot help it...''A fine book, probably the best tribute to the genius of Jane.' Glasgow Herald'[This book] cries out to be read, not alone by fans of Jane Austen but by anyone who enjoys a great, witty, gossipy read.' Irish Times'What fun Nokes's book is,' Fay Weldon, Independent'David Nokes is assertive, energetic, opinionated, satirical, supremely confident, dramatising and gleefully splenetic.' Hermione Lee

Inspired by Dostoyevsky's short story, The Double tells the story of Simon, a timid man, scratching out an isolated existence in an indifferent world. He is overlooked at work, scorned by his mother, and ignored by the woman of his dreams. He feels powerless to change any of these things. The arrival of a new co-worker, James, serves to upset the balance. James is both Simon's exact physical double and his opposite - confident, charismatic and good with women. To Simon's horror, James slowly starts taking over his life.