Faber and Faber Theft. A Love Story Кэри Питер

Peter Carey’s novel of the undeclared love between clergyman Oscar Hopkins and the heiress Lucinda Leplastrier is both a moving and beautiful love story and a historical tour de force set in Victorian times. Made for each other, the two are gamblers – one obsessive, the other compulsive – incapable of winning at the game of love

Sometimes – perhaps only for an instant – we fail to recognise a companion; for a moment their identity ceases to exist, and thus we come to doubt our own. The effect is at its most acute in a couple where our existence is given meaning by our perception of a lover, and theirs of us • With his astonishing skill at building on and out from the significant moment, Kundera has placed such a situation and the resulting wave of panic at the core of the novel. In a narrative as intense as it is brief, a moment of confusion sets in motion a complex chain of events which forces the reader to cross and recross the divide between fantasy and reality. Profound, sad and disquieting but above all a love story, Identity provides further proof of Kundera’s astonishing gifts as a novelist

Eager to clean up his act after his troubled early twenties, Owen has returned to Kentucky to take a job as a groundskeeper at a small college in the Appalachian foothills, one which allows him to enrol on their writing course • It’s there that he meets Alma, a Writer-in-Residence, who seems to have everything Owen doesn’t – a prestigious position, an Ivy League education, and published success as a writer. They begin a secret relationship, and as they grow closer, Alma, from a supportive, liberal family of Bosnian immigrants, struggles to understand Owen’s fraught relationship with his own family and home • Exploring the boundaries between life and art, and how our upbringings affect the people we can become, Groundskeeping is at heart a love story – a novel about two very different people navigating the turbulence of an all-consuming relationship, and the complications which can ruin it

In Ignorance, set in contemporary Prague, one of the most distinguished writers of our time takes up the complex and emotionally charged theme of exile and creates from it a literary masterpiece • A man and a woman meet by chance while returning to their homeland, which they had abandoned twenty years earlier when they chose to become exiles. Will they manage to pick up the thread of their strange love story, interrupted almost as soon as it began and then lost in the tides of history? The truth is that after such a long absence ‘their memories no longer match.’ We always believe that our memories coincide with those of the person we loved, that we experienced the same thing. But this is just an illusion as the memory records only ‘an insignificant, minuscule particle’ of the past, ‘and no one knows why it’s this bit and not any other bit

Winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature • An exiled poet returns to the remote city of Kars on the Turkish border to investigate troubling reports of a suicide epidemic among its young women. While there, he reconnects with the beautiful Ipek, and finds himself drawn irresistibly back into their love story • But Kars has become a touchpoint for religious and political violence and religious extremists are poised to win the local elections. As the snow falls and suspicion mounts, the stage is set for a terrible and desperate act

Junot Diaz’s new collection, This Is How You Lose Her, is a collection of linked narratives about love – passionate love, illicit love, dying love, maternal love – told through the lives of New Jersey Dominicans, as they struggle to find a point where their two worlds meet. In prose that is endlessly energetic and inventive, tender and funny, it lays bare the infinite longing and inevitable weaknesses of the human heart. Most of all, these stories remind us that the habit of passion always triumphs over experience and that ‘love, when it hits us for real, has a half-life of forever.’

Lose yourself in the thrilling political intrigue and tangled love affairs of wartime Egypt in Durrell’s epic modern classic, introduced by bestselling author Elif Shafak (The Forty Rules of Love) • An expat schoolteacher has spent years in exile reflecting on his turmoiled love affair with Justine, a glamorous Egyptian wife. Returning to wartime Alexandria, he finds that his old friends have suffered dramatic changes of body, mind, and fortune – and someone whom he has never really known wishes to see him. His affair with Clea, a bisexual artist, not only changes the lovers, but transforms the dead, forever – and heralds a new beginning, just as Lawrence Durrell’s intoxicating masterpiece ends

Lose yourself in the thrilling political intrigue and tangled love affairs of wartime Egypt: Durrell’s epic modern classic, introduced by William Boyd (bestselling author of Any Human Heart and Restless) • David Mountolive, a young English diplomat, has been obsessed with Egypt ever since a youthful love affair. Returning to Alexandria as British Ambassador just before World War Two, he unravels an intricate political and religious conspiracy – one that connects a web of wildly different characters, including an exiled schoolteacher and glamorous Egyptian couple. Mountolive gradually exposes the sinister underbelly of these tangled relationships, their deceptions and betrayals mirroring the explosive turmoil of the modern Middle East – and the result is Durrell’s most cinematic masterpiece

Flight Behaviour is a captivating, topical and deeply human story touching on class, poverty and climate change by global bestselling author Barbara Kingsolver, winner of the Women’s Prize for Fiction 2010 • “The flames now appeared to lift from individual treetops in showers of orange sparks, exploding the way a pine log does in a campfire when it is poked. The sparks spiralled upward in swirls like funnel clouds. Twisters of brightness against grey sky.” • On the Appalachian Mountains above her home, a young mother discovers a beautiful and terrible marvel of nature: the monarch butterflies have not migrated south for the winter this year. Is this a miraculous message from God, or a spectacular sign of climate change. Entomology expert, Ovid Byron, certainly believes it is the latter

Winner of the Whitbread Best First Novel of the Year • In his classic debut novel, Gordon Burn takes Britain’s biggest selling vocalist of the 1950s and turns her story into an equation of celebrity and murder. Fictional characters jostle for space with real life stars – from John Lennon to Doris Day and Sammy Davis Jnr – as Burn, in a breathtaking act of appropriation, reinvents the popular culture of the post-war years. As beautifully written as it is disturbing, Alma Cogan remains a stingingly relevant exploration of the sad, dark underside of fame

Oliver is eighteen and wants to enjoy himself before going to university. But this is the 1920s and he lives in Stilbourne, a small English country town where everyone knows what everyone else is getting up to, and where love, lust and rebellion are closely followed by revenge and embarrassment

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