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As portrayed in Homer's Odyssey, Penelope - wife of Odysseus and cousin of the beautiful Helen of Troy - has become a symbol of wifely duty and devotion, enduring twenty years of waiting when her husband goes to fight in the Trojan War. As she fends off the attentions of a hundred greedy suitors, travelling minstrels regale her with news of Odysseus' epic adventures around the Mediterranean - slaying monsters and grappling with amorous goddesses. When Odysseus finally comes home, he kills her suitors and then, in an act that served as little more than a footnote in Homer's original story, inexplicably hangs Penelope's twelve maids.Now, Penelope and her chorus of wronged maids tell their side of the story in a new stage version by Margaret Atwood, adapted from her own wry, witty and wise novel.The Penelopiad premiered with the Royal Shakespeare Company in association with Canada's National Arts Centre at the Swan Theatre, Stratford-upon-Avon, in July 2007.

The scandalous reputation of Laclos's novel, first published in 1782, is based on its chilling portrayal of the mannered decadence and sexual cynicism of the French aristocracy in the last years of the ancien regime. Christopher Hampton has made a masterful adaptation for the stage of the conspiracy to corrupt a young girl barely out of her convent.Les liaisons dangereuses was premiered by Royal Shakespeare Company at The Other Place, Stratford-upon-Avon, on 24 September 1985, and won Christopher Hampton the Evening Standard Award for Best Play and the Laurence Olivier Award for Best New Play in 1986.

'They are not for you but for a later age!' Ludwig van Beethoven, on the Opus 59 quartets.Tackling the Beethoven quartets is a rite of passage that has shaped the Takacs Quartet's work together for over forty years. Using the history of the composition and first performances of the quartets as the backbone to his story, Edward Dusinberre, first violinist of the Takacs since 1993 - recounts the life of the Quartet from its inception in Hungary, through emigration to the US and its present-day life as one of the world's renowned string quartets. He also describes what it was like for him, as a young man fresh out of the Juilliard School, to join the Quartet as its first non-Hungarian member - an exhilarating challenge. Beethoven for a Later Age takes the reader inside the life of a quartet, vividly showing how four people enjoy making music together over a long period of time. The key, the author argues, is in balancing continuity with change and experimentation - a theme that also lies at the heart of Beethoven's remarkable compositions.

Edward Lear was the greatest nonsensicalist of all time. He was the inventor of the limerick and created the Jumblies and The Owl and the Pussycat. This complete edition of Lear's nonsense verse - including the limericks, longer verses, alphabets and his own illustrations - is lovingly restored and beautifully presented, for adults and children to enjoy together.

A timeless collection of stories for younger children.In the eponymous The It-Doesn't-Matter Suit, little Max Nix is on a quest to find the perfect suit he can go ice-fishing, cow-milking and town-walking in. There's magic afoot in Mrs Cherry's Kitchen and children will love to find their perfect Nighty-night little / Turn-out-the-light little Bed! in The Bed Book.

For 6,557 miles, from New York to Mississippi to Seattle, Chuck Klosterman decided to chase rock n roll and death across a continent. 21 days later, after three relationships, an encounter with various cottonmouth snakes, and a night spent snorting cocaine in a graveyard, Klosterman started to order his thoughts on American culture and the meaning of celebrity.

From the opening story about a married woman who takes a trip to the city with a single purpose in mind - to sleep with another man - Antarctica draws you into a world of obsession, betrayal and fragile relationships. In 'House Calls', Cordelia wakes on the last day ofthe twentieth century and sets off along the coast road to keep a date with her lover that has been nine years in the waiting. In 'The Singing Cashier', a local postman visits two sisters bearingfishy gifts in the hope that his favour will be returned in kind. One of the most moving and disturbing stories in the collection, 'Passport Soup', features Frank Corso, who sits alone eating green tomatoes and bacon, mourning the disappearance of his nine-year-old daughter: 'At one point in that late evening, she was there, and then she wasn't.' Keegan's characters inhabit a world where dreams, memory and chance can have crippling consequences for those involved. Compassionate, witty and unsettling, Antarctica is a collection to be savoured.

Robert Aickman (1914-1981) was the grandson of Richard Marsh, a leading Victorian novelist of the occult. Though his chief occupation in life was first as a conservationist of England's canals he eventually turned his talents to writing what he called 'strange stories.' Dark Entries (1964) was his first full collection, the debut in a body of work that would inspire Peter Straub to hail Aickman as 'this century's most profound writer of what we call horror stories.'

I lay there alone in bed, feeling the black shadow creeping up the underside of the world like a flood tide. Nothing held, nothing was left. The silver airplanes and the silver capes all dissolved and vanished, wiped away like the crude drawings of a child in coloured chalk from the colossal blackboard of the dark.The writings in this collection outline Plath's early preoccupation with issues of mental illness, creativity and femininity, all of which would become recurrent themes in her later work. They offer special insight into her development as a writer, and arguably paved the way for her only full-length piece of prose writing, the loosely veiled fictional autobiography, The Bell Jar.This second edition contains the thirteen stories included in the first edition together with five pieces of her journalism, as well as a few fragments from her journal; and a further nine stories selected from the Indiana archive.

Miram Toews's All My Puny Sorrows - Sunday Times Top Choice Summer ReadElf and Yoli are two smart, loving sisters.Elf is a world-renowned pianist, glamorous, wealthy, happily married: she wants to die.Yoli is divorced, broke, sleeping with the wrong men: she desperately wants to keep her older sister alive.When Elf's latest suicide attempt leaves her hospitalised weeks before her highly anticipated world tour, Yoli is forced to confront the impossible question of whether it is better to let a loved one go.Miriam Toews's All My Puny Sorrows, at once tender and unquiet, offers a profound reflection on the limits of love, and the sometimes unimaginable challenges we experience when childhood becomes a new country of adult commitments and responsibilities.'The novel she has written - so exquisitely that you'll want to savour every word - reads as if it has been wrenched from her heart.' Christina Patterson, Sunday Times'[Miriam Toews] has produced a masterly book of such precise dignity. It is, also against all the odds, at times a desperately humorous novel.' Daily Mail 'Toews takes her place alongside Alice Munro, Robertson Davies, Margaret Atwood and Mordicai Richler as the loveliest quintet of Canadian writing.' Los Angeles Times

Agnes Day - sub-editor, suburbanite, failure extraordinaire - is unwell. Terminally middle-class, incurably romantic and chronically confused by life's most basic interactions, Agnes discovers disconcerting gaps in her general understanding of the world, making recovery unlikely. Life and love go on without her, but with a little facade, she can pass herself off as a success. Beneath the fiction, however, the burden of truth becomes harder to bear. 'She is a writer with a poet's eye for convincing detail, and touches on the raw emotions of life in a way that is affecting and true.' Sunday Telegraph'Told with irony and insight and some surreally beautiful imagery. At times it made me laugh out loud.' Sheila Mackay

In a bestselling work of profound and lasting importance, the late Albert Hourani told the definitive history of the Arab peoples from the seventh century, when the new religion of Islam began to spread from the Arabian peninsula westwards, to the present day. It is a masterly distillation of a lifetime of scholarship and a unique insight into a perpetually troubled region.This updated edition by Malise Ruthven adds a substantial new chapter which includes recent events such as 9/11, the US invasion of Iraq and its bloody aftermath, the fall of the Mubarak and Ben Ali regimes in Egypt and Tunisia, and the incipient civil war in Syria, bringing Hourani's magisterial History up to date. Ruthven suggests that while Hourani can hardly have been expected to predict in detail the massive upheavals that have shaken the Arab world recently he would not have been entirely surprised, given the persistence of the kin-patronage networks he describes in his book and the challenges now posed to them by a new media-aware generation of dissatisfied youth.In a new biographical preface, Malise Ruthven shows how Hourani's perspectives on Arab history were shaped by his unique background as an English-born Arab Christian with roots in the Levant.

Sylvia Plath was, for both English and American poetry, one of the defining voices of twentieth-century, and one of the most appealing: few other poets have introduced as many new readers to poetry. Though she published just one collection in her lifetime, The Colossus, and a novel, The Bell Jar, it was following her death in 1963 that her work began to garner the wider audience that it deserved. The manuscript that she left behind, Ariel, was published in 1965 under the editorship of her former husband, Ted Hughes, as were two later volumes, Crossing the Water and Winter Trees in 1971, which helped to make Sylvia Plath a household name. Hughes's careful curation of Plath's work extended to a Collected Poems and a Selected Poems in the 1980s, which remain in print today and stand testimony to the 'profound respect' that Frieda Hughes said her father had for her mother's work. It was not until the publication of a 'restored' Ariel in 2004 that readers were able to appraise Plath's own selection and arrangement of her work.This edition of the poems, chosen by the Poet Laureate Carol Ann Duffy, offers a fresh selection of Sylvia Plath's poetry to stand in parallel to the existing editions. Introduced with an inviting preface, the book is essential reading for those new to and already familiar with the work of this most extraordinary poet.

Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead is a play which, as it were, takes place in the wings of Hamlet, and finds both humour and poignancy in the situation of the ill-fated attendant lords. The National Theatre production in April 1967 made Tom Stoppard's reputation virtually overnight. Its wit, stagecraft and verbal verve remain as exhilarating as they were then and the play has become a contemporary classic.'One of the most original and engaging of post-war plays.' Daily Telegraph

'Obviously something more than a successful play, it is the practical demonstration of a patently conceived theory of dramatic form, and as such of high historical interest.' Times Literary Supplement'Eliot has attempted here something very daring and well worth doing. He has taken the ordinary West End drawing room comedy convention - understatement, upper-class accents and all - and used it as a vehicle for utterly serious ideas.' Observer

This volume, introduced by the author, brings together three novels first published separately. 'The trilogy comprises Carnival (1985), The Infinite Rehearsal (1987) and The Four Banks of the River of Space (1990), novels linked by metaphors borrowed from theatre, traditional carnival itself and literary mythology. The characters make Odyssean voyages through time and space, witnessing and re-enacting the calamitous history of mankind, sometimes assuming sacrificial roles in an attempt to save modern civilisation from self-destruction.' Independent on Sunday 'The Four Banks of the River of Space is a kind of quantum Odyssey... in which the association of ideas is not logical but... a 'magical imponderable dreaming'. The dreamer is Anselm, another of Harris's alter egos, like Everyman Masters in Carnival and Robin Redbreast Glass in The Infinite Rehearsal... Together, they represent one of the most remarkable fictional achievements in the modern canon.' Listener

The life he knew before the bomb no longer existed. That Leroy Kervin was gone.Willy Vlautin's stunning fourth novel opens with Leroy, a young, wounded, Iraq veteran, waking to a rare moment of clarity, his senses flooded with the beauty of remembering who he is but the pain of realising it won't last. When his attempt to end his half-life fails, he is taken to the local hospital where he is looked after by a nurse called Pauline, and visited by Freddie, the night-watchman from his group home for disabled men.As the stories of these three wounded characters circle and cross each other, we come to learn more of their lives. The father who caused her mother to abandon them both, and who Pauline loves and loathes in equal measure, the daughters Freddie yearns to be re-united with and, in a mysterious and frightening adventure story, the girlfriend Leroy dreams of protecting. Evoking a world which is still trying to come to terms with the legacy of a forgotten war, populated by those who struggle to pay for basic health care, Vlautin also captures how it is the small acts of kindness which can make a difference between life and death, between imprisonment and liberty. Haunting and essential, The Free is an unforgettable read.

'Brilliantly plotted . . . a spellbinder . . . it has a style that glows and crackles.' Spectator'Hugely funny, provocative, pathetic and heroic.' TLS'What are we, Papa?' the toy mouse child asked his father. 'I don't know,' the father answered. 'We must wait and see.'So begins the story of a tin father and son who dance under a Christmas tree until they break the ancient clockwork rules and are themselves broken. Thrown away, then rescued from a dustbin and repaired by a tramp, they set out on a dangerous quest for a family and a place of their own - the magnificent doll's house, the plush elephant and the tin seal they had once know in the toy shop.

Edited by J. C. C. MaysMurphy, Samuel Beckett's first novel, was published in 1938. Its work-shy eponymous hero, adrift in London, realises that desire can never be satisfied and withdraws from life, in search of stupor. Murphy's lovestruck fiancee Celia tries with tragic pathos to draw him back, but her attempts are doomed to failure. Murphy's friends and familiars are simulacra of Murphy, fragmented and incomplete. But Beckett's achievement lies in the brilliantly original language used to communicate this vision of isolation and misunderstanding. The combination of particularity and absurdity gives Murphy's world its painful definition, but the sheer comic energy of Beckett's prose releases characters and readers alike into exuberance.

On 15 April 1989, 96 people were fatally injured on a football terrace at an FA Cup semi-final in Sheffield. The Hillsborough disaster was broadcast live on the BBC; it left millions of people traumatised, and English football in ruins. And the Sun Shines Now is not a book about Hillsborough. It is a book about what arrived in the wake of unquestionably the most controversial tragedy in the post-war era of Britain's history. The Taylor Report. Italia 90. Gazza's tears. All seater stadia. Murdoch. Sky. Nick Hornby. The Premier League. The transformation of a game that once connected club to community to individual into a global business so rapacious the true fans have been forgetten, disenfranchised. In powerful polemical prose, against a backbone of rigorous research and interiew, Adrian Tempany deconstructs the past quarter century of English football and examines its place in the world. How did Hillsborough and the death of 96 Liverpool fans come to change the national game beyond recognition? And is there any hope that clubs can reconnect with a new generation of fans when you consider the startling statistic that the average age of season ticket holder here is 41, compared to Germany's 21. Perhaps the most honest account of the relationship between the football and the state yet written, And the Sun Shines Now is a brutal assessment of the modern game.

At 11.40pm on 14 April 1912, the RMS Titanic, on its maiden voyage from Southampton to New York, struck an iceberg. At 2.20am the following morning, the ship sank. 1,517 people died.In response to the disaster the British Government ordered an immediate inquiry and Lord Mersey was appointed commissioner. The British Wreck Commissioner's Inquiry sat from 2 May to 3 July 1912. It took testimony from 97 witnesses.Owen McCafferty's Titanic retells the survivors' stories, using dialogue taken word-for-word from the hundred-year-old accounts. Full of intrigue, bravery and human frailty, this courtroom drama premiered in April 2012 as the inaugural production of the MAC, Belfast.

"e;Cold Hand in Mine"e; was first published in the UK in 1975 and in the US in 1977. The story "e;Pages from a Young Girl's Journal"e; won the Aickman World Fantasy Award in 1975. It was originally published in "e;The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction"e; in 1973 before appearing in this collection. "e;Cold Hand in Mine"e; stands as one of Aickman's best collections and contains eight stories that show off his powers as a 'strange story' writer to the full, being more ambiguous than standard ghost stories. Throughout the stories the reader is introduced to a variety of characters, from a man who spends the night in a Hospice to a German aristocrat and a woman who sees an image of her own soul. There is also a nod to the conventional vampire story ("e;Pages from a Young Girl's Journal"e;) but all the stories remain unconventional and inconclusive, which perhaps makes them all the more startling and intriguing. "e;Of all the authors of uncanny tales, Aickman is the best ever...His tales literally haunt me; his plots and his turns of phrase run through my head at the most unlikely moments"e;. (Russell Kirk).

Thomas Bernhard (1931-1989) has been hailed by Gabriel Josipovici as 'Austria's finest postwar writer' and by George Steiner as 'one of the masters of contemporary European fiction.' Faber Finds is proud to reissue a selection of four of Bernhard's finest novels. Concrete (1982) is a brilliant and haunting tale of procrastination, failure, and despair: the story of Rudolph, a Viennese musicologist, who neglects the work he is meant to be producing in favour of this dark and grotesquely funny account of small woes writ large, of profound horrors detailed and rehearsed to the point of distraction: from a meddling sister and a house that he hates, to an 'illness' he carefully nurses, his own very real writer's block, and an 'escape' to Majorca which brings him no release from himself.'Masterful... A book of mysterious dark beauty.' John Rechy, Los Angeles TimesA masterpiece.' New Yorker

'The Hollow Crown is exhilarating, epic, blood-and-roses history . . . Jones's material is thrilling . . . There is fine scholarly intuition on display here and a mastery of the grand narrative; it is a supremely skilful piece of storytelling.' Sunday TelegraphThe fifteenth century saw the crown of England change hands seven times as the great families of England fought to the death for power, majesty and the right to rule. The Hollow Crown completes Dan Jones' epic history of medieval England, and describes how the Plantagenets tore themselves apart to be finally replaced by the Tudors.Some of the greatest heroes and villains in British history were thrown together in these turbulent times: Henry V, whose victory at Agincourt and prudent rule at home marked the high point of the medieval monarchy; Edward IV, who was handed his crown by the scheming soldier Warwick the Kingmaker, before their alliance collapsed into a fight to the death; and the last Plantagenet, Richard III, who stole the throne and murdered his own nephews, the Princes in the Tower. Finally, the Tudors arrived - but even their rule was only made certain in the 1520s, when Henry VIII ruthlessly hunted down his family's last remaining enemies.In the midst this tumult, chivalry was reborn, the printing press arrived and the Renaissance began to flourish. With vivid descriptions of the battle of Towton, where 28,000 men died in a single morning, and the Battle of Bosworth Field, at which Richard III was hacked down, this is the real story behind Shakespeare's famous history plays.

May, 1937, and London prepares to crown a new king.Bestselling writer Josephine Tey is in town to oversee a BBC radio production of her play, Queen of Scots - but adultery, treachery and pent-up jealousies stalk the corridors of Broadcasting House. At the height of the Coronation celebrations, Detective Chief Inspector Archie Penrose is called in to investigate the murder of one of the BBC's best-known broadcasters. A second victim - his mistress, and the play's leading actress - suggests that the motive lies close to home, but Josephine suspects that the killings are linked to a decade-old scandal.With Archie's hands tied by politics, and his attention taken by another, seemingly unrelated death, it is left to Josephine to get to the truth. As her relationship with Marta Fox reaches a turning point, she is forced to confront at first-hand the deadly consequences of love, deceit and betrayal.Rich in the atmosphere of coronation London and the early days of Broadcasting House, the sixth novel in Nicola Upson's 'Josephine Tey' series sets an audacious, deeply personal crime against the backdrop of one of the most momentous days in British history.

Britain, although not the first Mass Observation title, was the one that made its name. Britain was published as Penguin Special and is reported as selling over 100, 000 in ten days. It was published in January 1939, and seventy years on Faber Finds are reissuing it. The aim of Mass Observation was to create 'an anthropology of ourselves', to provide a study of everyday lives of ordinary people in Britain. In this book, arranged and written by Tom Harrisson and Charles Madge (two of the founders of Mass Observation) the notorious year of 1938 is anatomized. It was the year of Munich. The first half of the book deals with the unfolding crisis, culminating with Neville Chamberlain waving his scrap of paper, the agreement with Hitler, from No. 10 Downing Street. A Mass Observation observer was there. The Press gave wildly misleading impressions of the turn-out. In fact the crowd was under 5000. As the commentary tartly observes, 'No second division football club could survive on a Chamberlain gate.' A bleakly comic moment is recorded, 'P. M. stretches out his arm for silence. Several in crowd appear to take this as a Fascist salute and stretch forth their arms likewise.'Other chapters deal with the dance craze 'The Lambeth Walk', all-in wrestling, the cow's-head cult of Westhoughton (the chapter is aptly entitled A Slight Case of Totemism) and the Two Minutes' Silence on Armistice Day. As the Times said then, ' . . . With these anthropological spies among us one wonders how statesmen and journalists will ever again dare to speak and write on behalf of ''the people''. For here are ''the people''.

The Irish famine that began in 1845 was one of the nineteenth century's greatest disasters. By its end, the island's population of eight million had shrunk by a third through starvation, disease and emigration. This is a brilliant, compassionate retelling of that awful story for a new generation - the first account for the general reader for many years and a triumphant example of narrative non-fiction at its best.The immediate cause of the famine was a bacterial infection of the potato crop on which too many the Irish poor depended. What turned a natural disaster into a human disaster was the determination of senior British officials to use relief policy as an instrument of nation-building in their oldest and most recalcitrant colony. Well-meaning civil servants were eager to modernise Irish agriculture and to improve the Irish moral character, which was utterly lacking in the virtues of the new age of triumphant capitalism. The result was a relief programme more concerned with fostering change than of saving lives.This is history that resonates powerfully with our own times.

This book is about the 'other' Norman Conquest. It is the story of Robert Guiscard, perhaps the most extraordinary European adventurer between Caesar and Napoleon. In one year, 1084, he had both the Eastern and Western Emperors retreating before him and one of the most formidable of medieval Popes in his power. It is also the story of his brother Roger, thanks to whom he conquered Sicily from the Saracens; and of Roger's descendants, notably his son Roger 11, who converted his father's achievement into a cosmopolitan and cultivated kingdom whose surviving monuments still dazzle us today. The Normans in the South is the first of two volumes that recount the dazzling story of the Norman Kingdom of Sicily. The second volume The Kingdom of the Sun is also being reissued in Faber Finds. 'Diligence, narrative skill, and a scholarship fired by enthusiasm' Lord Kinross, Sunday Telegraph'I found the book very enjoyable indeed. It is beautifully written.' Nancy Mitford

London 2011. Catherine Gehrig, conservator at the Swinburne museum, learns of the unexpected death of her lover of thirteen years - but as the mistress of a married man, she has to grieve in private. Her employer at the museum, aware of Catherine's grief, gives her a special project - to piece together both the mechanics and the story of an extraordinary automaton, commissioned in the nineteenth century by Henry Brandling to amuse his dying son. Linked by the mysterious automaton, Catherine and Henry's stories intertwine across time to explore the mysteries of life and death, the miracle and catastrophe of human invention and the body's astonishing chemistry of love and feeling.

How new is atheism?In Battling the Gods, Tim Whitmarsh journeys into the ancient Mediterranean to recover the stories of those who first refused the divinities.Long before the Enlightenment sowed the seeds of disbelief in a deeply Christian Europe, atheism was a matter of serious public debate in the Greek world. But history is written by those who prevail, and the Age of Faith mostly suppressed the lively free-thinking voices of antiquity.Tim Whitmarsh brings to life the fascinating ideas of Diagoras of Melos, perhaps the first self-professed atheist; Democritus, the first materialist; and Epicurus and his followers. He shows how the early Christians came to define themselves against atheism, and so suppress the philosophy of disbelief.Battling the Gods is the first book on the origins of the secular values at the heart of the modern state. Authoritative and bold, provocative and humane, it reveals how atheism and doubt, far from being modern phenomena, have intrigued the human imagination for thousands of years.