40 Sonnets Paterson Don Faber and Faber

Faber Stories, a landmark series of individual volumes, presents masters of the short story form at work in a range of genres and styles • ‘Be sure you don’t answer the door to anyone you don’t know.’ • A little Patricia Highsmith, a touch of Shirley Jackson: the long-neglected Celia Fremlin wrote short, sharp stories that threw women’s lives into shiver-inducing relief • In each of these twinned tales, a mother and daughter meet again, and an ordinary home becomes the setting for a return of the repressed • Bringing together past, present and future in our ninetieth year, Faber Stories is a celebratory compendium of collectable work

Faber Stories, a landmark series of individual volumes, presents masters of the short story form at work in a range of genres and styles • ‘My only concern’, John McGahern once said, ‘is that I get the sentence right and describe my world clearly and deeply.’ • ‘The Country Funeral’ witnesses three brothers, John, Philly and Fonsie Ryan, as they travel west from Dublin to Gloria Bog – the heart of the territory where so many of McGahern’s stories take place – to attend the funeral of their uncle. Depicting the customs and rituals of the day, McGahern exquisitely traces how the brothers react to the area in unexpected and tender ways, and face their own feelings about the transience of life • Bringing together past, present and future in our ninetieth year, Faber Stories is a celebratory compendium of collectable work

Faber Stories, a landmark series of individual volumes, presents masters of the short story form at work in a range of genres and styles • Between his second and third tours of duty, a soldier returns home • To his former home, that is, using an old key while the new tenant is at work. Is he re-entering his old life or borrowing someone else’s? Where is the line he will not cross? Each day is the same: he exists in a state of suspension, barely knowing how he passes the time – until someone else intrudes on the intruder • Adrian Tomine, graphic master of alienation and regret, expertly expands the form to express the unsaid and the unbearable in this unforgettable evocation of a post-traumatic life • Bringing together past, present and future in our ninetieth year, Faber Stories is a celebratory compendium of collectable work

Faber Stories, a landmark series of individual volumes, presents masters of the short story form at work in a range of genres and styles • You try every trick in the book to keep her. You write her letters. You drive her to work. You quote Neruda … You try it all, but one day she will simply sit up in bed and say, No more • In Yunior, a Dominican-American writer and Harvard professor, Junot Diaz has created an irresistibly erratic protagonist, who sweeps you up in the poetic energy of his speech as he rehearses a broad repertoire of bad behaviour • Originally the climactic tale in the chain-linked This is How You Lose Her, 'The Cheater's Guide to Love' is a superb standalone song of decadence and experience • Bringing together past, present and future in our ninetieth year, Faber Stories is a celebratory compendium of collectable work

Faber Stories, a landmark series of individual volumes, presents masters of the short story form at work in a range of genres and styles • A chance encounter leads a man to spend the afternoon with an older woman, now a widow, who escaped him fifteen years earlier. Neither of them doubts that the day will end in disgust, but for one intimate moment each finds a way to overcome mortality • Written in 1969, before Milan Kundera was known to English-speaking readers, this story renders male and female characters painful equals, and prompted Philip Roth to admire its ‘detached Chekhovian tenderness’ • Bringing together past, present and future in our ninetieth year, Faber Stories is a celebratory compendium of collectable work

Faber Stories, a landmark series of individual volumes, presents masters of the short story form at work in a range of genres and styles • This heart is sore and sad. Crossed in love? • The manuscript of ‘Giacomo Joyce’, written in James Joyce’s best handwriting and folded between the covers of a school notebook, was discovered in Trieste. Most likely written in 1914, some of it served as a rehearsal for passages in Ulysses. Had Joyce meant to pillage it or publish it? Either way, this fragmented evocation of unrequited desire is, in the words of Joyce’s biographer Richard Ellmann, a work of ‘small, fragile, enduring perfection’ • With a new introduction by Colm Toibin • Bringing together past, present and future in our ninetieth year, Faber Stories is a celebratory compendium of collectable work

Faber Stories, a landmark series of individual volumes, presents masters of the short story form at work in a range of genres and styles • Of course, of everybody of whom this particular hero was suspicious, he was most suspicious of femme fatale, of this woman he was in love with. Even before he discovered she had a spell on her he was distrustful of her. He didn’t want to be, but that’s just how it goes • Written by Anna Burns before she completed her dazzling Man Booker-winning novel Milkman, ‘Mostly Hero’ is the hilarious, hell-raising descendant of Quentin Tarantino and the Brothers Grimm. Originally self-published online, it is available here in print for the first time • Bringing together past, present and future in our ninetieth year, Faber Stories is a celebratory compendium of collectable work

Faber’s bestselling hamster series is given a smart new livery, repositioning our favourite as a perennial classic character, sitting alongside the likes of Winnie the Pooh and Wind in Willows • Dear Friends, • When Og the Frog came to live in Room 26, I felt a little jealous. Still, I tried to be welcoming but I soon discovered that it’s HARD-HARD-HARD to make friends with a lumpy, bumpy frog! • Then I found out that my fellow students were having problems with their friends, too. A.J. and Garth had to deal with a bully named Mean Martin Bean. Heidi and Gail had a terrible argument, and Miranda-Golden had a new stepsister who wasn’t nice at all. Then there was the Poetry Festival, the magic show and the snowstorm! How could one small hamster solve all those problems? • Luckily, I wrote the whole story in my notebook so you could share my adventures

Faber's bestselling hamster series is given a smart new livery, repositioning our favourite as a classic character, sitting alongside the likes of Winnie the Pooh and Wind in Willows • Jingle bells and dancing snowflakes, Christmas was coming and suddenly Humphrey's life as a classroom hamster became unsqueakably exciting! • The music teacher, Miss Lark, spent a lot of time preparing the class for the school show so there was plenty of fun-fun-fun. But Humphrey's classmates were also having some big-big-big problems

Faber’s bestselling hamster series is given a smart new livery, repositioning our favourite as a perennial classic character, sitting alongside the likes of Winnie the Pooh and Wind in Willows • The next in the bestselling According to Humphrey series, Humphrey and his friends in Room 26 learn about ancient Egypt. Mummies, pharaohs, pyramids and plenty of SHH-SHH-SHH secrets abound! Will Humphrey be able to solve the mysteries of the pharaohs…? • From award-winning author Betty G. Birney

And the black man and the white were like two men alone in the world … • Xuma will never forget the day he arrived in the Johannesburg slums: the charismatic woman who takes him in, the brutal police raids, the fights, friendships, dancing, drinking and romances – yet it soon feels like home. But when he becomes a leader in the city’s gold mines, he is shocked by the racist treatment of the labourers. And as he begins to question whether ‘man could be without colour’, Xuma stages an act of defiance that changes his life forever • In 1946, Peter Abrahams’ classic novel Mine Boy exposed South Africa’s fledgling racial apartheid system and townships to the world – and its wisdom, vividness and political power endures to this day

A young video shop assistant exchanges the home comforts of one mother-figure for a fleeting 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 sleepy 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, and tender – these entertaining stories detail the lives of people who know where they are, but don’t know what they’re doing