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'The Thousand Deaths Of Mr Small is the best novel that Gerald Kersh has yet written... Charles Small, successful advertising expert and miserable man, turns over in his mind the 'stinking, sour, stagnant, untransmitted mass' which is his life... This book has a rich, warm quality; long and full of detail, it teems with humour, satire, incident, character; in a word, with life.' Yorkshire Post'It see-saws from side-splitting dialogue to such catalogues of loathing and revulsion as have rarely been seen in print, from outrageous farce to sudden compassion for the Smalls of this world, who find Hell enough in 'the eternal contemplation of themselves as they made themselves.'' New York Herald Tribune'With brilliant descriptive power and an emetic vocabulary, [Kersh] has produced a tormented and forceful work.' Commonweal

With The Song Of The Flea (1948) Gerald Kersh revisited the demi-monde of his famous Night And The City; but this novel concerns a writer, striving doggedly to make his living.'A remarkable novel... with this book Mr Kersh has taken a big step forward.' Sunday Times'[Kersh] has a remarkable talent... he is one of the comparatively few living novelists in this country who write with energy and originality and whose ideas are not drawn from a residuum of novels that have been written before... [The Song of the Flea] is the story of John Pym, a young man trying to earn his living as a writer... Mr Kersh draws on his picturesque and convincing knowledge of human vileness in a manner which is both entertaining and instructive.' Times Literary Supplement.

Night and the City (1938) made Gerald Kersh's reputation, but it was as a war novelist that he reached a wide readership in 1942, via a pair of books about British army recruits, led by Sergeant Bill Nelson, preparing to see service in France. This Faber Finds edition collects both books.'[They Die With Their Boots Clean] is a picture of life in the raw in the Coldstream Guards, with all itsrigorous discipline, its humour and comradeship.' TLS[In The Nine Lives Of Bill Nelson] the conversations are terse, ferociously slangy, full of hyperbole and outrageous wit, often irresistibly funny.' TLS

'[This] is the story of the beginning and the end of St Paul, that most complicated and worrying of all the saints. The narrator is Diomed, a colonial officer stationed at Tarsus, enlightened, intelligent, a great fraterniser with the patrician natives, [who] sends the strange young Jew to persecute the Nazarenes... [Kersh brings] a highly concentrated area of Roman colonial history to very real life - the ornate wine-cup, the crapulous cold fruit-juice at dawn, dust on a sandal... King Jesus is here, all the time... the fly-itch nuisance to the Empire that wakes its prefects up in nightmare... This is a masterly book, full of live people and a live age, live language, too... We may adjudge Mr Kersh, after reading The Implaccable Hunter, to be now at the height of his powers.' Anthony Burgess, Yorkshire Post, 1961

'It is a quality of flamboyant vigour in Mr Kersh that wins attention first of all for his fiction, and more especially, perhaps, for his occasional short story. When his flamboyant energy of sentiment and language comes off he achieves an effect of genuine distinction; at his surest, that is, he is a short story writer of a strongly individual and rewarding kind... the best and cleverest [of the 23 stories in this volume] tells with excellent economy of a ventriloquist's dummy which was inhabited, or so it seemed, by the spirit of the ventriloquist's murdered father... 'The Drunk And The Blind', the sketch of an old, battered and mentally ruined boxer, is done with a telling and slightly brutal power. 'The Devil That Troubled The Chess-Board'... is another sound thing in a vein of the slightly macabre.' Times Literary Supplement (1944)

'[Gerald Kersh] is a story-teller of an almost vanished kind - though the proper description is perhaps a teller of 'rattling good yarns'... He is fascinated by the grotesque and the bizarre, by the misfits of life, the angry, the down-and-outs and the damned. A girl of eight commits a murder. Some circus freaks are shipwrecked on an island. A chess champion walks in his sleep and destroys the games he has so carefully planned...' TLS 'Beneath his talented lightness and fantasy, Gerald Kersh is a serious man... [He] has the ability... to create a world which is not realistic and which is yet entirely credible and convincing on its own fantastic terms.' New York Times 'Mr Kersh tells a story; as such, rather better than anybody else.' Pamela Hansford Johnson, Telegraph

'Charlie Smith is only one of many similar men who are at this moment living unhappily among us, or are confined in prison now but must sooner or later be released.'The Unknown Citizen (1963) was Tony Parker's second study of a criminal recidivist.'Mr Parker's very moving book tells what happened the day Charlie left prison and in his first year of freedom. Charlie himself contributes a pitiful attempt at a self-portrait. We have the author's conversations with the magistrate who sentenced him, with his sorely tried elder sister and with others who have come into his life in the last 18 months... The final chapter is masterly... This is literature, not just another book on crime.' D.L. Howard, Telegraph

Few crimes provoke such outrage and upset as the sex offence, making the subject - including the problems it poses to our society and criminal justice system - a natural one for sociologist Tony Parker, whose work consistently shed light into dark corners of human behaviour. The Twisting Lane, first published in 1969, presents the testimonies of eight men aged between 20 and 70 who had been convicted - most of them repeatedly - for eight different types of offence, from assault or rape of adults or minors, to indecent exposure and 'living on immoral earnings'. Each man offers, in his own words, his personal story and self-perception.'A remarkable achievement... almost every paragraph is poignant and revealing.' New Statesman

For his twelfth book, first published in 1985, Tony Parker was given near-unlimited access by the Ministry of Defence and spent eighteen months interviewing the officers and soldiers of a single British Army infantry regiment - as well as their wives. Both a pacifist and a former conscientious objector, Parker brought his singular perspective to the questioning of fighting men on what it means to bear arms for one's country.'A unique picture of a social institution which is an exaggerated microcosm of society and yet set apart from it.' Scotsman'A revealing glimpse into the lives and thoughts of the men in khaki.' Gerald Kaufman, Manchester Evening News'Captivating bedside reading.' Sunday Telegraph

'Those of you who have read Tony Parker's book The Plough Boy will be familiar with the story of Michael Davies. He was one of six youths concerned in an affray in which a boy was killed. Five of them received short terms of imprisonment, but Davies was condemned to death... The door to the execution shed was the first thing he saw when he opened his eyes every morning. That boy spent 92 days in the condemned cell watching that door before he was reprieved. I hope we can agree that torture of that kind shall never again be inflicted in Britain.'Baron Stonham, in the Lords debate on the Murder (Abolition of Death Penalty) Bill, 19 July 1965

'People of the streets... you become aware of them, and wonder who and what they are... what kind of lives they have, and what living them means...' First published in 1968, People of the Streets was Tony Parker's sixth book, for which he spent a year approaching and interviewing people in London who were living their daily lives on street corners, along gutters or in subways. With his usual skill he coaxed them out of their natural reticence, born of solitude, into an unfamiliar but hugely illuminating spontaneity.'In [Parker's] books the strength lies in the interpretive mind of the writer... He is a sociologist studying single cases in some depth and shows qualities of imagination shared by the historian and the biographer - a mixture of intelligence, sympathy and empathy.' TLS

First published in 1967, A Man of Good Abilities was Tony Parker's fifth book, and told the story of 65 year-old 'Norman Edwards', a compulsive swindler-embezzler for his whole adult life, one punctuated by numerous ineffective terms of imprisonment. Using journals, letters, and interview transcripts Parker drew a finessing portrait of a man and a seemingly intractable problem that he posed to society.'Tony Parker is a remarkably skilled and compassionate exponent of the documentary technique that he uses to illumine human character; with him, tape-recorded conversations are the stuff of art, not of mere photography.' New Society'In his books the strength lies in the interpretive mind of the writer... He is a sociologist studying single cases in some depth and shows qualities of imagination shared by the historian and the biographer - a mixture of intelligence, sympathy and empathy.' TLS

'A man, now, well sure enough, one of those you can forget; but a child is forever.' Kate ByrneFor No Man's Land, first published in 1972, Tony Parker persuaded six young unmarried mothers to talk frankly about their lives, their hopes and their problems. As ever Parker didn't impose himself upon the text: the women speak as and for themselves. As such No Man's Land is a precious sociological portrait of a Britain in which many believed that motherhood and marriage were subject to an umbilical linkage.'Tony Parker is himself unique: Britain's most expert interviewer, mouthpiece of the inarticulate, and counsel for the defence of whose whom society has shunned or abandoned.' Anthony Storr, Sunday Times

In 1970 Tony Parker was permitted by the Home Office to make a series of visits to HMP Grendon Underwood, the UK's first psychiatric prison, there to interview inmates and staff for a study of the institution and its unique community.'Tony Parker deserves a place in any future history of literature for his contribution to the creative use of the tape-recorder... We can only guess at the qualities of patience and perceptiveness which have enabled Mr Parker to make of his material one of the most important studies ever to have been published of the habitual criminal.' TLS'The reader will find himself as deeply involved with his characters as Mr Parker is himself.' Spectator

Five Women, first published in 1965, was Tony Parker's fourth book. Its intended subjects had emerged from Holloway prison for women on the same cold spring morning in 1963. Between them they shared 73 criminal convictions and nearly a hundred years 'inside'. Parker intended to interview each of the women about their lives, hopes, intentions, fears; and to arrange follow-up conversations in due course. But one disappeared immediately, and six months later two of the five were dead, two more back in prison. The scope of Parker's project duly changed, but not its purpose - to record the experiences and thoughts of women mired in the cycle of habitual offences and custodial sentences.

'I first met Robert Allerton in prison, where he was captive and I was not... He was a powerful broad-shouldered Cockney [who] had spent his childhood in poverty and much of his manhood in prison; and he had a long record of violent crime.' Tony Parker, from his IntroductionTony Parker's first book The Courage of His Convictions (1962), constructed out of his candid and illuminating dialogues with career criminal Robert Allerton (credited as co-author), is a stunning work that displays all the skills and virtues Parker would bring to his subsequent career as an 'oral historian' of the lives of society's marginal figures. 'This intimate autobiography is a revelation - it provides the first psychological insight into the mentality of that frightening, mysterious and pathetic product of our society, the professional criminal.' Arthur Koestler

'[The White Father] was to be a State of the Nation novel, about the end of Empire, contrasting the last generation of men who'd served it, and the new one which was just breaking out from the long dullness of the post-war years, but didn't really know where it was going...' Julian Mitchell, from his new PrefaceMitchell's fourth novel, published in 1964, earned him both the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize and the Somerset Maugham Award. Its protagonist Hugh Shrieve is District Officer in charge of the Ngulu, a small tribe in an African colony on the verge of independence. Fearing 'his' tribe will be overlooked in the politics of a constitutional conference set to take place in London, Hugh returns to England for the first time in years. But there he soon feels lost in his own country.

Imaginary Toys (1961) marked the literary debut of the then 26-year-old Julian Mitchell, who would eventually set aside his prizewinning career as a novelist and achieve wider renown as a dramatist, most famously with Another Country (1981). Imaginary Toys is a novel of Oxford after World War Two, where class consciousness has become newly acute, and a quartet of narrators wrestle with their studies and their more personal difficulties - among the four a coalminer's son and the daughter of a solid bourgeois family, who fall in love to the discomfort of their respective friends.In the first of a sequence of reflective, autobiographical new introductions composed especially for Faber Finds' reissues of his early novels, Julian Mitchell recalls the atmosphere of mid-1950s Oxford, and the path he took to a literary vocation.

A Disturbing Influence was Julian Mitchell's second novel, first published in 1962.The setting is the small, utterly English town of Cartersfield, where the very quietness of life causes trouble. The young and old are preoccupied alike with their own affairs, to the exclusion of the world. Tetchy schoolmaster Mr Drysdale sums it up: 'We don't care much for change in Cartersfield.' But change comes regardless, in the shape of a rootless young man who finds Cartersfield a fine place in which to recuperate after an illness, and a fine place, too, to indulge his appetite for destruction.In a fascinating new preface to this reissue Julian Mitchell describes how he drew on his Cotswold childhood and the town of Cirencester in order to invent his fictional Cartersfield and populate it with a cast of characters.

Julian Mitchell's fifth novel, first published in 1966, is the story of Martin Bannister, whose lonely bachelor life in Manhattan is transformed by a meeting with desirable redhead Henrietta Grigson and her husband Freddy, with whom he embarks on a heady social whirl. But Martin has a surprise in store - a plot twist the real-life inspiration for which Julian Mitchell divulges in his new preface to this Faber Finds edition.'A comedy that is delightfully human, played by characters who have the edgy vitality of real life.'Evening Standard'Mitchell is a writer of the most supple technical accomplishment.' Telegraph'Ingeniously constructed and excellently written.' Listener

As Far As You Can Go was Julian Mitchell's third novel, first published in 1963. Its protagonist is Harold Barlow, a young stockbroker, on his way up in the world - but easily bored, desiring adventure. He accepts a commission to travel to America; and the further west he goes, the more he discovers in the way of wide open spaces and freedoms. There is, however, a limit.In an introduction written especially for this edition, Julian Mitchell describes his interest in writing 'a reverse Henry James novel, about a European discovering America rather than vice-versa.''Like Nabokov, but without his cynicism, Mr Mitchell sets the geography of the United States in motion.' Anthony Burgess, Observer'This raid on the American psyche, so hilarious, yet so horrific in its implications, proves Mr Mitchell a first-rate satirist.' Telegraph

Bit of a wide boy, Terry. Got a spot of form, eye for the ladies, a real rough diamond some might say. Not without his virtues, though, as his campaign for open government shows. No secrets, that's Terry's secret. Allied to charm, that is, of course. Only one person finds it easy to resist his charm and counter his arguments and that's Hilary - one of the serious and dedicated young Civil Servants working in the Home Office in Westminster, who just happens to know the truth about the case in which Terry is currently interested. She despises him and everything he stands for. But then why is she to be found one evening walking through the back streets behind the Strand, to the run-down block where Terry's pressure group has its headquarters? Now You Know takes on government campaigns, ambitious civil servants and determined pressure groups with Frayn's trade-mark wit. Michael Frayn's other novels include Headlong, which was shortlisted for the Booker Prize, and Spies, which won the Whitbread Best Novel Award.

Heaven, reported St John in Revelation, was a cubical city 12,000 furlongs high made of 'pure gold, like unto clear glass'. That was 1,900 years ago, and Heaven as it is today has changed out of all recognition. Sweet Dreams is the account of a recent journey to the metropolis at the nerve-centre of the universe. The journey was undertaken not by a mystical reporter like St John, but by Howard Baker, an observer of much more modern outlook. He finds a city which offers rich opportunities for leisure and enjoyment - but one which also presents a moral and intellectual challenge. In short, a city which is highly adapted to the requirements of modest, responsible, likeable, educated men of liberal views and genuine social concern called Howard Baker.Michael Frayn is the celebrated author of plays such as Copenhagen and Afterlife. His bestselling novels include Headlong, which was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize, Spies, which won the Whitbread Best Novel Award and his latest novel Skios, which was longlisted for the Man Booker Prize.'May go down in history as one of England's special contributions to the twentieth century.' Times Literary'Lucid, intelligent, delightful, stylish, extremely funny . . . I recommend it wholeheartedly.' New York Times

He knows everything about her before they meet; more about her nine novels that she does herself. He has devoted his life to studying and teaching them and yet he is four times as clever as she is. Now, as she steps off the train in London, something about her in the flesh sets him thinking. Maybe he has a chance to resolve the one remaining mystery at the heart of things. . . Through a series of letters sent by a minor English Literature academic to his old friend in Australia, Frayn combines a vivid and moving study of obsession, with a witty and playful account of what it's like to be on the fringes of the creative process. Michael Frayn is the celebrated author of fifteen plays including Noises Off, Copenhagen and Afterlife. His bestselling novels include Headlong, which was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize, Spies, which won the Whitbread Best Novel Award and Skios, which was longlisted for the Man Booker Prize.

For sixty years Elizabeth II has met each of her twelve prime ministers in a weekly audience at Buckingham Palace, a meeting like no other in British public life. It is private. Both parties have an unspoken agreement never to repeat what is said. Not even to their spouses.The Audience breaks this contract of silence. It imagines a series of pivotal meetings between the Downing Street incumbents and their Queen. From Churchill to Cameron, each prime minister has used these private conversations as a sounding board and a confessional - sometimes intimate, sometimes explosive.From young mother to grandmother, these private audiences chart the arc of the second Elizabethan Age. Politicians come and go through the revolving door of electoral politics, while she remains constant, waiting to welcome her next prime minister.The Audience by Peter Morgan premiered at the Gielgud Theatre, London, in March 2013.

It is 1941. Only child Leo invites schoolfriend Justin to stay the summer on the western tip of Cornwall. Addicted to adventure tales, one night they swim out to investigate a supposed 'spy ship' moored off the coast. The outcome is unnerving for the boys but momentous for Leo's mother Andrea, bringing her into contact with Lieutenant Commander Mike Harrington.'Tim Jeal is a great storyteller... Deep Water is not only an extremely gripping novel, it is also thought-provoking and it subjects the conventional ideas about heroism, romantic love and adventure to a subtle yet searching examination.' Irish News'A very satisfying novel... brilliantly done.' Nina Bawden, The Oldie'Jeal brilliantly conveys a child's interpretation of the world... it is fascinating to watch a child taking revenge on his mother and her lover in such a dramatic fashion.' Times

Tim Jeal's sixth novel, first published in 1983, recreates the frenetic Britain of the 1960s and tells an enthralling tale of three individuals bound together by a risky experiment conducted amid the pop-cultural ferment of the era. Paul Carnforth is young, wealthy, titled, and alive to the opportunities of his times. 'You don't have to like pop to find it interesting', he tells his sceptical wife. Paul decides to fashion a pop star of his own - as a 'moral swipe', also proof of his individual brilliance. But the creation will soon threaten to outgrow his creator.'Pop music, working class heroes, record companies, music publishers and stately homes as settings for orgiastic settings, it's all here ... Mr Jeal writes comedy very well.' Irish Times'Tim Jeal is a writer very much out of the ordinary - trenchant, elegant, subtle.' Sunday Telegraph

'A majestic Victorian tale... Wealthy lawyer Esmond, discarded illegitimate son of a peer, has pinched his way to the top of his profession, while his handsome, debt-ridden cavalry officer brother Clinton has inherited the title and the ancestral home. Beautiful actress Theresa, a widow, a fierce free spirit with a sinewy wit, is the woman both will love.' Kirkus Reviews 'It is rare in this field to meet the realities of passion, its shifts and treacheries; when this combines with rich historical details, including recondite legal and financial ones, the result is outstanding.' Observer 'The novel does imperatively make you want to know what happens next. Three cheers for narrative.' New Statesman 'A superb novelistic situation, starkly worked out as it would be in real life... I was intensely concerned for the fortunes of these people.' Elizabeth Jenkins, Kaleidoscope (BBC)

First published in 1976, Until the Colours Fade was Tim Jeal's fourth novel, set in 1852 in a Lancashire mill town transformed by the Industrial Revolution. Disenfranchised cotton workers are restless, while landed gentry make uneasy common cause with newly wealthy manufacturers. When painter Tom Strickland encounters the combustible Magnus Crawford, lately returned from military service abroad, he is drawn into a web of local hatreds and intrigues that will lead to an epic conclusion at the siege of Sebastopol.'First-rate - I was hooked from the first page... Jeal has a close sympathy for the passions and politics of Victorian Britain.' Times'A long, meaty, intelligent, historical novel, full of qualities like surprise, expectation and its fulfilment, dramatic description and real understanding of the physical enormities of old-style campaigns like the Crimea.' Financial Times'Jeal handles his ambitious range of settings with considerable craftsmanship.'TLS

Derek Cushing - thirtyish, balding, unassuming archivist/researcher into European expansion in East Africa - is also the son of Gilbert, father of Giles, and husband of Diana. On the last count, though, he has begun to fear that he is wearing cuckold's horns. His plan for addressing the crisis leads him to take his wife, son and ageing father to stay at the Cornish mansion of the smooth-talking gallery owner he believes to be his wife's lover. But this, at least, is a place where disputes may be brought to a head.First published in 1974, Cushing's Crusade was Tim Jeal's third novel, for which he won the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize.'Mr Jeal is a writer very much out of the ordinary, trenchant, elegant, subtle.' Sunday Telegraph'A charming, highly enjoyable and most accomplished novel.' Nina Bawden, Telegraph'Extremely funny, perceptive and moving.' Guardian