Faber and Faber Nocturnes: Five Stories of Music and Nightfall Исигуро Кадзуо

The Tastemaker charts the singular life of a man who has been at the beating heart of music’s most iconic moments for over sixty years and features stories of his time working with everyone from the Beatles to the Ronettes and Elton John to the Rolling Stones • Leaving school at the age of sixteen to start his career in the music industry at Decca Records, Tony King would soon find himself becoming a close friend and confidante to some of the world’s biggest artists – a far cry from his childhood days in Eastbourne • Living in an era of seismic social, technological and cultural transformation, King experienced these defining moments as an influential figure in London and New York’s gay scenes. Despite his heady life in showbusiness, however, he would soon learn that a glittering career couldn’t shield him from heartbreak – witness to the AIDS crisis and the devastating consequences, his personal life was intermittently marked by tumult and turmoil

From bestselling author and winner of the Blue Peter Book Award, this is the sixth adventure set in the world of Podkin One-Ear • ‘Why are you worried? You have us beside you! We’ve captured three spirits already. We’ve beaten Endwatchers, two clans, snakes, plagues and a whole ocean of disgusting maggots.’ • After capturing Charice, there is only one spirit left for Uki to find: Mortix, the most dangerous of all. With his friends Jori, Cole and Kree, Uki heads to Eisenfell – the greatest city in Hulstland – only to find that Mortix has taken control of Emperor Ash and is plotting to conquer the whole Five Realms with her terrifying army • Uki must dodge the Endwatch, the Shrikes, Clan Septys and the guards and find a way to complete his quest before all is lost

It is 1967. Two men lie bedridden in separate wings of a Viennese hospital. The narrator, Thomas Bernhard, is stricken with a lung ailment; his friend Paul, nephew of Ludwig Wittgenstein, is suffering from one of his periodic bouts of madness. As their friendship quickens, these two eccentric men discover in each other an antidote to their feelings of despair on the unexpected strength of what they share – a spiritual symmetry forged by their love of music, black humour, disgust for bourgeois Vienna, and fear of mortality • A restless blend of fiction and memoir, Wittgenstein’s Nephew is not only a haunting meditation on the artist’s struggle to maintain a foothold on reality, but an impassioned eulogy to a real-life friendship – newly illuminated by Ben Lerner’s afterword

An indelible exploration of the Cultural Revolution and how it shapes China today, Red Memory uncovers forty years of silence through the rarely heard stories of individuals who lived through Mao’s decade of madness • A 13-year-old Red Guard revels in the great adventure, and struggles with her doubts. A silenced composer, facing death, determines to capture the turmoil. An idealistic student becomes the ‘corpse master’ • More than fifty years on, the Cultural Revolution’s scar runs through the heart of Chinese society, and through the souls of its citizens. Stationed in Beijing for the Guardian, Tania Branigan came to realise that this brutal and turbulent decade continues to propel and shape China to this day. Yet official suppression and personal trauma have conspired in national amnesia: it exists, for the most part, as an absence

Once upon a time, there was a rich merchant who had three daughters. The girls were just as clever as they were bella and none more so than the youngest, whose name was Beauty • Disappear to faraway lands of wicked witches, evil monsters and brave heroines in former Poet Laureate Carol Ann Duffy’s stunning collection of fairy tales. Including her beautiful and haunting retellings of the Grimm classics Hansel and Gretel, Snow White and the Pied Piper, as well as other tales from around the world, and new stories of her own, this book will make you think again about once upon a time • With ethereal illustrations by Tomislav Tomic, this uncommonly beautiful book is a very special introduction to – or reminder of – many classic fairy tales

In the late 1970s, a young boy disappears from a summer cabin in the Swedish woods. His mother claims that he was abducted by a giant. The boy is never found • Twenty-five years later, an old woman claims that a creature has been standing outside her house, observing her and her five year old grandson for hours • When Susso – a blogger who’s dedicated her life to the search for creatures whose existences have not been proved – hears of this, and sees a possible link between the two incidents, she takes to the road on a terrifying adventure into the unknown…

This absorbing, ironic, bitter-sweet collection of nine stories marked Lorrie Moore’s talented debut. Sharp, cruel and funny, the stories are presented as a highly idiosyncratic guide to female existence: ‘How to be an Other Woman’, ‘How to Talk to Your Mother (Notes)’, ‘How to Become a Writer’, ‘The Kid’s Guide to Divorce’

When two men meet in a bookshop in Berlin they begin an uneasy friendship. Patrick has a sensational story to tell: a ghostwriter for a Russian oligarch recently found hanged, he says the people who killed his boss are now following him… • A twist on the cat-and-mouse narrative, A Lonely Man is about the search for identity and the elastic nature of truth. As the two men’s association hurtles towards tragedy, Robert is forced to confront whether actual events are the only things that give a story life, and if some stories are too dangerous to tell…

Plague is not the only killer — an historical epic of murder and mystery, myth-making and nation-building, from the winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature • 1901. Night draws in • With the stealth of a spy vessel, the royal ship Aziziye approaches the famous vistas of Mingheria. ‘An emerald built of pink stone’. The 29th state of the ailing Ottoman Empire • The ship carries Princess Pakize, the daughter of a deposed sultan, her doctor husband, and the Royal Chemist, Bonkowski Pasha. Each of them holds a separate mission. Not all of them will survive the weeks ahead. Because Mingheria is on the cusp of catastrophe. There are rumours of plague – rumours some in power will try to suppress • But plague is not the only killer • Soon, the eyes of the world will turn to this ancient island, where the future of a fragile empire is at stake, in an epic and playful mystery of passion, fear, scandal and murder, from one of history’s master storytellers

From award-winning and internationally bestselling author of Demon Copperhead and Flight Behaviour, The Lacuna is the heartbreaking story of a man torn between the warm heart of Mexico and the cold embrace of 1950s America in the shadow of Senator McCarthy • Born in America and raised in Mexico, Harrison Shepherd is a liability to his social-climbing flapper mother, Salome. When he starts work in the household of Mexican artists Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo – where the Bolshevik leader, Lev Trotsky, is also being harboured as a political exile – he inadvertently casts his lot with art, communism and revolution. A compulsive diarist, he records and relates his colourful experiences of life with Diego Rivera, Frida Kahlo and Trotsky in the midst of the Mexican revolution

From bestselling author and winner of the Blue Peter Best Story Book Award, Uki and the Swamp Spirit is the fifth title set in the world of Podkin One-Ear • Uki had the sensation of a sickly green light, spreading out through the networks of water. Of tendrils connecting all the creatures of the marsh in a web . . . Linking itself so it could poison it all and destroy it • Uki and his friends have two more spirits to find and capture. After defeating Valkus, they make for Clarice, who is spreading disease through the swamps. Can Uki and his friends outwit him – all whilst they themselves are being chased by the Endwatch and Jori’s clan of assassins?