Faber Editions – serie

Introduced by Jeff VanderMeer - 'a classic: stunning, dangerous, darkly beautiful' - welcome to the post-apocalyptic White Lotus: a luxury hotel at the end of the world in this lost 1967 dystopia for fans of Jacqueline Harpman's I Who Have Never Known Men.'Chilling and prescient.' Andrew Hunter Murray 'Elemental and true.' Kiran Millwood Hargrave 'Mesmerizing.' Sandra Newman 'Like someone from the future screaming to us.' Salena GoddenThe day we came up from the shelters four people were found dead on the steps of the hotel.Welcome to Termush: a luxury coastal resort like no other. All the wealthy guests are survivors: preppers who reserved rooms long before the Disaster. Inside, they embrace exclusive radiation shelters, ambient music and lavish provisions; outside, radioactive dust falls on the sculpture park, security men step over dead birds, and a reconnaissance party embarks.Despite weathering a nuclear apocalypse, their problems are only just beginning. Soon, the Management begins censoring news; disruptive guests are sedated; initial generosity towards Strangers ceases as fears of contamination and limited resources grow. But as the numbers - and desperation - of external survivors increase, admist this moral fallout, they must decide what it means to forge a new ethical code at the end (or beginning?) of the world ...Translated by Sylvia Clayton

'A forgotten classic: darkly funny and startlingly contemporary, full of witty one-liners and stop-you-in-your-tracks observations about romance, work, and life.' Monica Heisey, Really Good, Actually'I was floored: truly brilliant.' Meg Mason, Sorrow and Bliss'A devastating, wryly funny and shockingly modern novel' Pandora Sykes 'Bridget Jones in the Jazz Age . . . A century on, it's cause for celebration.' Observer It feels remarkable to be a deserted wife when one is only twenty-four.New York, 1924. Patricia and Peter are a thoroughly modern married couple. Both drink. Both smoke. Both work. Both believe in 'Love-Outside-Marriage'. Until they don't. Or, really, until he doesn't. So when Peter pushes for divorce with increasing violence, Patricia has to forge a new life as a single woman: as an ex-wife.A sensational bestseller in 1929, yet utterly timeless, Ex-Wife plunges us into the 'era of the one-night stand'. It evokes not only the Manhattan bars, fashion advertising offices, female friendships and all-night parties of a dazzling city, but the hollow affairs, emotional hangovers, backstreet abortions, and struggles for sexual freedoms amidst the moral double standards of a patriarchal world.

One Londoner gambles on his own life in this lost classic by 'one of the great English Jewish novelists' (Times), introduced by Iain Sinclair.'Terrific. Propulsive, funny and touching.' Sebastian Faulks'A fascinating snapshot of a lost London world, by a remarkable neglected writer.' Sarah WatersA wonderfully enduring novel . . . A great rediscovery.' William Boyd'Perfect . . . Captures London in all its grime and glory.' Benjamin MyersNever give up hope before the dogs have crossed the finishing-line.Harryboy Boas is a lowlife gambler. When he's not at the track, he lives in a Hackney boarding house, reading Zola, eating salt beef, pressing trousers and repressing wartime memories. But when a new family moves into the apartment downstairs, his life starts to unravel and Harryboy soon finds himself sinking into a murky East End underworld where violence, guilt and gangsters are the inevitable result for those who cannot pay their dues.A celebrated cult classic, The Lowlife brilliantly evokes post-war East London - dog tracks, sandwich shops, tenements, sex workers, newly arrived West Indians and Jews leaving for Finchley - all seen through the tragicomic eyes of Harryboy, our picaresque rogue hero suffering from 'existential burn-out in the shadow of the Holocaust' (Iain Sinclair) and driven to bet, brag and beg to survive.'The greatest British novelist of the last war and among the finest, most underrated, of the postwar period.' Guardian

A lost dystopian classic, set in a future without death, introduced by Sophie Mackintosh, for fans of Jeff VanderMeer, Emily St. John Mandel, and Jacqueline Harpman's I Who Have Never Known Men.'A dazzling, deadpan nightmare.' Kaliane Bradley, author of The Ministry of Time'A chilling, thought-provoking tale about the unexpected perils of eternal life.' Andrew Hunter MurrayYou don't own yourself any longer. Society owns you. Bruno, a young magazine editor, seems to live a charmed life, until he discovers a growth on his neck - the first sign of incurable cancer. But his doctor offers him a unique opportunity: Bruno can choose to be 'frozen down' until medical science has found a cure for his condition. He makes his decision, just after meeting and falling in love with an enigmatic ballet dancer.Decades later, he wakes up to find himself cured, but the world is now a very different place. Freezing technology is now ubiquitous, the pleasures of life have been subtly drained and society has started to fracture. Bruno must decide what he really wants from his life and whether it's worth the cost.Fans of dystopian fiction will love this creepingly claustrophobic classic, which asks all the big questions about ageing, death, scientific progress and the meaning of life.'Whilst grappling with existential questions, Freezing Point is also deeply entertaining, veering from slapdash caper to dreamlike, psychedelic sequences and deadpan absurdity.' Sophie Mackintosh

For fans of The Passenger, this thrilling tale of an ex-Nazi surgeon hiding in plain sight in 1960s London by the celebrated filmmaker is a lost noir gem, introduced by Anthony Quinn and narrated on audio by Mark Gatiss, as chosen by Ian Rankin on BBC Radio 4's A Good Read.'Stunning: incredibly good, tense and compelling and morally complex.' Ian Rankin'This extraordinary novel had me hooked from start to finish.' Sarah Waters'An outstanding novel: gripping, tense and darkly unsettling. ' Jonathan Freedland'A wonderfully compelling noir thriller and audacious and challenging act of imagination.' William Boyd'One of the best London novels of the 20th century.' Benjamin Myers Nothing is more inviting to disclose your secrets than to be told by others of their own ...London, June 1965. Karl Braun arrives as a lodger in Pimlico: hatless, with a bow-tie, greying hair, slight in build. His new neighbours are intrigued by this cultured German gentleman who works as a piano tuner; many are fellow émigrés, who assume that he, like them, came to England to flee Hitler. That summer, Braun courts a woman, attends classical concerts, dances the twist. But as the newspapers fill with reports of the hunt for Nazi war criminals, his nightmares become increasingly worse .'A haunting, remarkable novel, as startlingly original as any of Pressburger's films.' Nicola Upson'A dark and harrowing window on the past: the ending will haunt your dreams.' Janice Hallett

The amphibious cult classic: this magical tale of a suburban housewife's affair with a frogman is 'seductive' (Margaret Atwood), 'genius' (Patricia Lockwood), 'perfect' (Max Porter), 'a feminist masterpiece' (Carmen Maria Machado), and 'out-weirds and out-romances anything today' (Marlon James).Dorothy is a grieving housewife in the Californian suburbs; her husband is unfaithful, but they are too unhappy to get a divorce. One day, she is doing chores when she hears strange voices on the radio announcing that a green-skinned sea monster has escaped from the Institute for Oceanographic Research - but little does she expect him to arrive in her kitchen. Muscular, vegetarian, sexually magnetic, Larry the frogman is a revelation - and their passionate affair takes them on a journey beyond their wildest dreams ... Rachel Ingalls's Mrs Caliban is a bittersweet fable, a subversive fairy tale, as magical today as it was four decades ago.'A perfect novel.' New YorkerWhat Readers Are Saying:'Maybe the most gorgeous, lyrical book ever written'*****'A fantastic wee novel, strange and brilliant, and absolutely the inspiration for The Shape of Water.'*****'Wonderful, sharp minimal prose offers big truths. Superb - brilliant, in fact.'*****'Absolutely incredible. It's weird, funny, and heartbreaking, like a Richard Yates novel except with lizardman sex.'*****'One of the best tongue-in-cheek social satires that I've ever read. It asks the reader to examine what it means to be human ... Genius.'*****'Really brilliant: a deconstruction of suburbia by way of monster movies ... Sometimes you need a sexy frog person to break you out of the ties that bind. '*****'Hooked me so deeply I picked it up and finished it the same night.'*****'What the hell just happened?'*****

Introduced by Hilton Als, in 'one of the best novels about adolescence in American literature' (New York Times) two siblings come of age in a mountainous wilderness ...'One of the strangest and angriest novels of the twentieth century.' Lauren Groff'An extraordinary, savage novel.' Olivia Laing'I love this novel.' Patricia LockwoodShe would not feel safe until the beautiful animal was dead.Ralph and Molly are inseparable siblings: united against the stupidity of daily routines, their prim mother and prissy older sisters, the world of adult authority. One summer, they are sent from their childhood home in suburban Los Angeles to their uncle's Colorado mountain ranch, where they write, hunt, roam. But this untamed wilderness soon becomes tainted by dark stirrings of sexual desire - and as the pressures of growing up drive an irrevocable rift between them, their innocent childhoods hurtle towards a devastating end . . .'Beautiful, and sensitive, and quickening.' Eileen Myles'A glimmer of genius.' Rumaan Alam'Breathtakingly original.' Tessa Hadley'A brilliant achievement [to] set beside Carson McCullers's masterwork The Member of the Wedding.' Joyce Carol Oates

For fans of I Who Have Never Known Men, a 'creepily prescient' (Margaret Atwood) lost dystopian 'masterpiece' (Emily St. John Mandel): in a nightmarish Britain, THEY are coming closer.'Ceepy, tense and strange.' Ian Rankin 'Delicious and sexy and downright chilling ... Read it!' Rumaan Alam 'The signature of an enchantress.' Edna O'Brien 'I'm pretty wild about this paranoid, terrifying 1977 masterpiece.' Lauren Groff 'Completely got under my skin.' Kiran Millwood Hargrave 'Lush, hypnotic, compulsive.' Eimear McBride 'A masterwork of English pastoral horror.' Claire-Louise Bennett 'A short shocker.' Andrew Hunter MurrayThis is Britain: but not as we know it. THEY begin with a dead dog, shadowy footsteps, confiscated books. Soon the National Gallery is purged; eerie towers survey the coast; mobs stalk the countryside destroying artworks - and those who resist.THEY capture dissidents - writers, painters, musicians, even the unmarried and childless - in military sweeps, 'curing' these subversives of individual identity.Survivors gather together as cultural refugees, preserving their crafts, creating, loving and remembering. But THEY make it easier to forget ...Lost for half a century, newly introduced by Carmen Maria Machado, Kay Dick's They (1977) is a rediscovered dystopian masterpiece of art under attack: a cry from the soul against censorship, a radical celebration of non-conformity - and a warning.

AS HEARD ON BBC RADIO 4'S 'A GOOD READ'Such a wonderful book. Utterly unique, exquisitely crafted and quietly powerful. I loved it and want everyone to read this lost literary treasure.' Bernardine Evaristo'Maud Martha finds beauty in the brutal formative moments that make us. It is one of my favorite depictions of how a woman comes to trust her eyes.' Raven Leilani'The quotidian rises to an exquisite portraiture of black womanhood in the hands of one of America's most foundational writers.' Claudia Rankine'Maud Martha reveals the poetry, power and splendor of an ordinary life.' Tayari Jones'Incredible ... She is a quietly radical seer, she is literature itself, a person in the world. It's a rare kind of perfect!' Max PorterWhat, what, am I to do with all of this life?Maud Martha Brown is a little girl growing up on the South Side of 1940s Chicago. Amidst the crumbling taverns and overgrown yards, she dreams: of New York, romance, her future. She admires dandelions, learns to drink coffee, falls in love, decorates her kitchenette, visits the Jungly Hovel, guts a chicken, buys hats, gives birth. But her lighter-skinned husband has dreams too: of the Foxy Cats Club, other women, war. And the 'scraps of baffled hate' - a certain word from a saleswoman; that visit to the cinema; the cruelty of a department store Santa Claus- are always there .Written in 1953 but never published in Britain, Maud Martha is a poetic collage of happenings that forms an extraordinary portrait of an ordinary life: one lived with wisdom, humour, protest, rage, dignity, and joy.

Introduced by Claire-Louise Bennett, experience one new mother's psychological journey in this lost 1930 foremother of Sylvia Plath's The Bell Jar.'Astonishing and moving. A pretty amazing book.' Tessa Hadley'Extraordinary. A fascinating and unexpected delight.' Lucy Ellmann'Haunting and evocative, this is a timeless portrayal of madness.' Catherine Cho'A startling, luminous and magnetic novel about the complexity of motherhood.' Yiyun Li'With its deep musicality, Coleman's unforgettable voice was years ahead of its time.' Sinéad Gleeson'The most famous unknown of the century.' Djuna Barnes, author of NightwoodThe only thing to do is to put hammers in the porridge and when there are enough hammers we shall break down the windows and all of us shall dance in the snow.Some days, Marthe Gail believes she is God; others, Jesus Christ. Her baby, she thinks, is dead. The red light is shining. There are bars on the window. And the voices keep talking. Time blurs; snow falls. The doctors say it is a breakdown; that this is Gorestown State Hospital. Her fellow patients become friends and enemies, moving between the Day Room and Dining Hall, East Hall and West Side, avoiding the Strong Room. Her husband visits and shows her a lock of her baby's hair, but she doesn't remember, yet - until she can make it upstairs, ascending towards release ...Shocking and hilarious, tragic and visceral, this experimental portrait of motherhood and mental illness written in 1930 has never felt more visionary.

'The forerunner of an entire school of African literary art.' Sunday TimesThose men who are history now; did they feel like this?A 1950s Hampstead pub; a freezing night. Lois can't tear her eyes away from the haunted, restless African man in the corner. Over brandy and stew, she discovers he is in awe of her friend, Panafrica's greatest political writer and fighter. Their meeting inducts this stranger, Udomo, into London's revolutionary community of exiled African activists: the start of a life-changing journey. Amidst the internal politics and love affairs, Udomo is inspired by other leaders' independence uprisings; but when he returns to his native land to overthrow the colonial oppressors, his idealism is put to the ultimate test ... Inspired by Peter Abrahams' befriending of future African heads of state in mid-century London, A Wreath for Udomo (1956) is a radical lost classic, unforgettably exploring the nature of freedom, power, leadership and love.

An eccentric professor saves a London Zoo ape from a rocket experiment in this dazzling classic by a trailblazing animal rights activist, introduced by Sarah Hall.'Pitch-perfect.' Ali Smith'So original.' Hilary Mantel'Stunning.' Isabel Waidner'There is nobody quite like her.' A.S. Byatt'Her beastly, risky best.' Eley WilliamsWhen my species has destroyed itself, we may need yours to start it all again. In London Zoo, Professor Darrylhyde is singing to the apes again. Outside their cage, he watches the two animals, longing to observe the mating ritual of this rare species. But Percy, inhibited by confinement and melancholy, is repulsing Edwina's desirous advances. Soon, the Professor's connection increases as he talks, croons, befriends - so when a scientist arrives on a secret governmental mission to launch Percy into space, he vows to secure his freedom. But when met by society's indifference, he takes matters into his own hands . . . A trailblazing animal rights campaigner, Brigid Brophy's sensational 1953 novel is as provocative and philosophical seventy years on. An electric moral fable, it is as much a blazingly satirical reflection on homo sapiens as the non-human - on our capacity for violence, red in tooth and claw, not only to other species, but our own.

A Lost Great American Master: meet Jack Kerouac's inspiration in these heart-expanding tales of immigrant life in 1930s USA, introduced by superfan Stephen Fry.JACK KEROUAC: 'I loved him ... He just got me'ARTHUR MILLER: 'The first to let it all hang out and write like a child in wonderland.'KURT VONNEGUT: 'Still the greatest.'JOSEPH HELLER: 'My primary inspiration.'STEPHEN FRY: 'One of the most underrated writers of the century.'I hadn't had a haircut in forty days and forty nights, and I was beginning to look like several violinists out of work.Depression-era San Francisco, home to the lost souls of many races: immigrants, struggling writers and heartsick adolescents, collecting in automats, nightschools, movies and barbershops, working in vineyards, telegram exchanges and as salesmen - and always revelling in being alive.A bestseller on publication in 1934, The Daring Young Man on the Flying Trapeze was the debut collection by the Pulitzer Prize-winning (and rejecting) Armenian-American writer William Saroyan. Fusing Whitman's transcendence with the eccentric characterisation of Steinbeck and Salinger, and foreshadowing the rhapsodies of the Beats, his prose is a heart-expanding experience that intoxicates to this day.

AS CELEBRATED ON BBC FRONT ROW'This breathtaking collection is a marvel.' Tayari Jones'Astute, brilliantly observed, timeless:' Jackie Kay'Her precocious and brilliant talent hasn't aged at all.' Damon Galgut'Exquisite ... These stories are all gems.' Mendez'You hold your breath, completely at her mercy.' Lucy CaldwellAnd she was becoming frightened too, looking at all those white faces pressed against the windowpanes.One Black family comes under attack as their little boy prepares to start at an all-white school.Friends plan a protest sit-in at the Rose Crest Tea Room, only to be arrested.The first Black student - always the 'Experiment' - retreats into her closet at a newly integrated college.And when a social worker enters a secluded woodland cabin, she meets the fate of all visitors . . .Tragically killed aged twenty-two in 1966, Diane Oliver's masterly stories resonate today with renewed urgency. Steeped in the nightmarish horror of life for the Black community in the Jim Crow-era American South, these chilling tales explore toxic racism and the human toll of activism for 'the cause' with heartbreaking empathy and wisdom. Depicting African American families whole and broken, daily injustices and life-threatening political struggle, Neighbors restores a lost star to the twentieth-century literary canon.

Join Dostoevsky on his tumultuous honeymoon in this hypnotic cult classic , introduced by Susan Sontag.'A wonderful work of art.' Jon McGregor'Extraordinary in its confidence and enchantment.' Chris Power'Addictive, dreamlike and dazzlingly unique.' Adam Thirlwell'Luminous, melancholy and enraptured.' Chloe AridjisWhy was I reading this book now, in a railway-carriage, beneath a wavering, flickering, electric light-bulb . . Summer, 1867: The newlywed Dostoevsky and his young wife Anna - his one-time secretary - are travelling to the German spa resort of Baden-Baden on honeymoon. Their love is ecstatic, yet the author is plagued by demons: haunted by his crimes and punishments, consumed by fevers of jealousy, gambling to avoid mounting debts and shaken by epileptic fits. Winter, 1970s: Our Jewish narrator embarks on a pilgrimage from Moscow to Leningrad to trace the footsteps of his literary hero. As the train travels across the Soviet Union's bleak expanses, he immerses himself in Anna's travel journal: and their journeys - past and present, real and imagined - soon become entwined. The result of a clandestine literary vocation, Summer in Baden-Baden was smuggled out of the Soviet Union in 1981 and first published in a Russian émigré weekly in the USA. It has since been hailed as a trailblazing modern classic, translated into more than twenty languages - and its hypnotic, enigmatic power only grows.

"Everything is always topsy-turvy here," he said.A small town in the Ural mountains is the backdrop to the heartbreak and joys of a Russian-Jewish family, witnessing romance and illness, funerals and friendships, and the catastrophe of wartime invasion.Amidst the snowy peaks of the Ararat valley, a married couple from Moscow admire the view from their hotel balcony, unprepared for the absurdist realities of tourism in the USSR.From chandeliered metro stations to institute bus stops, monolithic skyscrapers and cockroach-infested apartments, Leonid Tsypkin evokes the tragicomedy of Soviet existence in transcendental prose.

Join a young Ghanaian woman on her journey into Europe's heart of whiteness to meet the natives in this iconoclastic modern classic.'A wondrous discovery.' Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie'A treasure: one of the works that inspired my own literary journey.' Tsitsi Dangarembga'Aidoo has reaffirmed my faith in the power of the written word.' Alice Walker'Modest, lyrical, reflective and intelligent .. Deserves as wide an audience as it can get.' Angela Carter'Ver do you come from?' she asked Sissie. 'Ghana.' 'Is that near Canada?'Sissie is leaving Ghana for the first time. Arriving in Europe on a scholarship to experience the glories of a Western education, she plunges into this new continent's heart of whiteness, observing the strange customs of the natives.Drinking cocktails at the German Embassy, she cringes at her countrymen.In a Bavarian castle, she is seduced by the lonely mother of Little Adolf.In freezing London, she witnesses 'been-tos' sharing myths of an overseas idyll.In between continents, she writes a letter on the plane to her exiled former lover.But it is not sent. She will tell these tales back at home.Ama Ata Aidoo's landmark debut Our Sister Killjoy exploded into the world in 1977. With its blistering feminist satire of the West African diaspora, colonial legacies and toxic racism, expressed in a radical literary form - prose poetry, letter, manifesto - its provocative impact remains unmatched half a century on.Introduced by Ayesha Harruna Attah

This lost coming-of-age classic is a tragicomic portrait of one young woman's university breakdown and recovery for fans of The Bell Jar and Girl, Interrupted.'More relevant than ever.' Daisy Johnson (in a new foreword)'It took my breath away.' Meg Mason'A magnificent literary experience.' Melissa Broder'Enthralling and necessary.' Claire Kilroy'Radiant and powerful.' Claire-Louise BennettI wanted the knack of existing. I did not know the rules ...A tea party at an Oxford college. Earnest undergraduates in floral dresses clink cups, discussing essay-crises, punting, summer balls. But to one student, they are grotesquely transformed: she is sitting among ominous armadillos with scaly shells, buzzing with black flies. Then, the laughter comes. As she is engulfed by mirthless hysterics, the Principal has no choice but to send her away.Josephine's entrance into the world of other people wasn't what she imagined. Since her mother's death, reality seems a badly painted canvas, viewed through the wrong end of a telescope; she always thinks the wrong things, cowed by the brightness of existence. It is a relief to belong, for once, within the mental institution where she is taken. But eventually, she must reintegrate with society-and through a transformative encounter with a fellow patient, a return to real life seems possible ...Winner of the 1961 James Tait Black Memorial Prize

An outrageously witty tragicomedy-of-manners about a queer black teenager coming of age, introduced by Mendez, author of Rainbow Milk.When a peacock's days are over, they're over.Oliver is precocious, black and gay. He reads Baudelaire, plays with his pet peacock, eats smoked oysters and fends off the maid Della Mae whenever she gets the 'Nasties'. He lives in rural Michigan with two elderly ladies: the white, wealthy Etta and her devoted housekeeper, Harry, his aunt. When a psychic warlock named Maurice LeFleur comes to stay, however, promising to contact the ghost of Etta's dead son, their eccentric household starts to fall apart.First published in 1965, at the height of the Civil Rights Movement, this sparklingly witty debut novel is a radically hopeful vision of racial integration and sexual acceptance that was years ahead of its time.

Lose yourself in this tumultuous Swedish family saga, introduced by Sarah Moss ('a masterpiece')Judit is stubborn and singular, distant and unyielding. She is called Queen. Her realm is a windswept farm on a misty Swedish coastline.When she is nine, her dying mother places Judit's brother Viktor in her arms, and the two are bonded for life. Together with their silent brother, Albert, they forge a precarious family. But Judit has her secrets; she dreams amidst the salt spray. And when Viktor emigrates to America, the ground beneath her feet forever shifts.Translated into English for the first time, Queen (1964)is a visionary family saga: a mythic epic in miniature, mystical and anarchic. One of the greatest Swedish novelists of all time, Birgitta Trotzig casts another worldly light across the souls of her characters - and her readers.Translated by Saskia Vogel 'Fear, rage, love, resentment: the full range of human emotion is here . . . A story fuelled by inevitability and cold beauty.' Sarah Moss