‘I want to tell a story. A long but simple story. A tale of long recovery. A tale of love. A tale of lost and found.’In his remarkable new novel, award-winning Australian author Michael Meehan sensitively explores the links between generational conflict, family, and the creative act.At its heart An Ungrateful Instrument is a novel that portrays a son’s struggle to be more than a mere instrument of the father’s ambition. Antoine Forqueray and later his son ...

The qualities and achievements of eighteenth century English literature have suffered denigration as a result of a prevailing Whig interpretation of literary history. It is the contention of this book, originally published in 1986, that an alternative form of Whig interpretation is possible and even desirable. It has as its sphere of interest the ways in which views on the nature and benefits of political freedom, and various "whiggish" readings of literary history, political theory and ae...

'I felt always that the crumbling paper must hold something that was more like speaking flesh and blood that somewhere amid these shreds I would learn something of this family lost to silence; something about a house that was quickly abandoned and a family divided, and then all gates shut on the past.'A young Australian man arrives in riot-ravaged Paris, armed with an old manuscript written in French and an obsessive desire to piece together the fragments of a mystery that...

Martin Frobisher has been beating close family members about the head with an epergne. Frobisher, successful publisher and community leader, is in the City Remand Centre, awaiting trial for murder. What shadow has fallen across the comfortable lives of Frobisher, his ambitious wife Coralie and her flaky sister Madeleine? What has led a cultivated and reflective man, known to shoo spiders and earwigs out of the harm's way, to such reckless acts of violence?With the prospect of impri...

From the New York Times bestselling author of Sarah's Key and A Secret Kept comes an absorbing new novel about one woman's resistance during an époque that shook Paris to its very core.Paris, France: 1860's. Hundreds of houses are being razed, whole neighborhoods reduced to ashes. By order of Emperor Napoleon III, Baron Haussman has set into motion a series of large-scale renovations that will permanently alter the face of old Paris, moul...

Henry Miller's famously banned book is "a matter-of-fact celebration of chucking one's dreary life and following your heart to Paris" (Richard Price).Now hailed as an American classic, Tropic of Cancer, Henry Miller's masterpiece, was banned as obscene in this country for twenty-seven years after its first publication in Paris in 1934. Only a historic court ruling that changed American censorship standards, ushering in a new era of freedom and frankness in...

In 1997, P. D. James, the much loved and internationally acclaimed author of mysteries, turned seventy-seven. Taking to heart Dr. Johnson's advice that at seventy-seven it is "time to be in earnest," she decided to undertake a book unlike any she had written before: a personal memoir in the form of a diary. This enchanting and highly original volume is the result. Structured as the diary of a single year, it roams back and forth through time, illuminating James's extraordinary, sometimes p...

Returning home from a visit to a client late one summer's evening, antiquarian bookseller Adam Snow takes a wrong turning and stumbles across the derelict old White House. Compelled by curiosity, he approaches the door, and, standing before the entrance feels the unmistakeable sensation of a small hand creeping into his own, 'as if a child had taken hold of it'. Intrigued by the encounter, he determines to learn more, and discovers that the owner's grandson had drowned tragically many year...

Collected Poems made publishing history when it first appeared, and has now sold more than two million copies, to an ever-growing readership. This newly expanded edition includes Betjeman's verse autobiography, Summoned by Bells. With a new Introduction by Poet Laureate, Andrew Motion, Collected Poems is the definitive Betjeman companion.

**Set in late 1980s Europe at the time of the fall of the Berlin Wall, this novel is the intimate story of the crumbling of a marriage, as witnessed by an outsider—from the Booker Prize winner and bestselling author of Atonement."Brilliant.... [A] meditation on ... the intoxications and the redemptive power of love." —The New Yorker**Jeremy is the son-in-law of Bernard and June Tremaine, whose union and estrangement began almost simultaneously. Seeking to ...

For the first time, Faber publish a selection from the poetry of Philip Larkin. Drawing on Larkin's four collections and on his uncollected poems. Chosen by Martin Amis.'Many poets make us smile; how many poets make us laugh - or, in that curious phrase, "laugh out loud" (as if there's another way of doing it)? Who else uses an essentially conversational idiom to achieve such a variety of emotional effects? Who else takes us, and takes us so often, from sunlit levity to mellifluous...

**NATIONAL BESTSELLER • The Booker Prize winner and bestselling author of Atonement brilliantly illuminates the collision of sexual longing, deep-seated fears, and romantic fantasy on a young couple’s wedding night.“No one now writing in English surpasses or even matches McEwan's accomplishment." —The Washington Post Book World**It is 1962, and Florence and Edward are celebrating their wedding in a hotel on the Dorset coast. Yet as they dine, the expectati...