Faber and Faber Uki and the Swamp Spirit Ларвуд Киран

Sampath Chawla was born in a time of drought that ended with a vengeance the night of his birth. All signs being auspicious, the villagers triumphantly assured Sampath’s proud parents that their son was destined for greatness • Twenty years of failure later, that unfortunately does not appear to be the case. A sullen government worker, Sampath is inspired only when in search of a quiet place to take his nap. “But the world is round,” his grandmother says. “Wait and see! Even if it appears he is going downhill, he will come up the other side. Yes, on top of the world. He is just taking a longer route.” No one believes her until, one day, Sampath climbs into a guava tree and becomes unintentionally famous as a holy man, setting off a series of events that spin increasingly out of control

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

The vibrant energy of 1990s London. A year of passion and discovery. The anxiety and intensity of new love • An eighteen-year-old Irish girl arrives in London to study drama and falls violently in love with an older actor. While she is naive and thrilled by life in the big city, he is haunted by demons, and the clamorous relationship that ensues risks undoing them both. At once epic and exquisitely intimate, The Lesser Bohemians is a celebration of the dark and the light in love

The highly anticipated second novel from the author of the acclaimed The Secret Starling and The Accidental Stowaway – a spectacular adventure set through and under the streets of Paris • When Penelope Magnificent’s awful parents tell her they’re taking a trip to Paris, she surprises them by begging to go along • Nell is usually content to avoid her money-obsessed father and her fashion-focussed mother, but Paris holds something very dear to her . . . her old au pair Perrine – Pear – lives there. Pear used to write to Nell every week promising to come to her rescue but recently the letters have stopped • Arriving at her parent’s posh hotel, Nell is determined to find Pear . . . but no one has seen her at her last known address, and no one seems to want to tell her anything about Pear’s whereabouts

The inhabitants of a Greek village, ruled by the Turks, plan to enact the life of Christ in a mystery play but are overwhelmed by their task. A group of refugees, fleeing from the ruins of their plundered homes, arrive asking for protection - and suddenly the drama of the Passion becomes reality

When Glasgow journalist Gerry Conway receives a phone call promising unsavoury information about Scottish Justice Minister Peter Lyons, his instinct is that this apparent scoop won’t warrant space in The Tribune. But as Conway’s curiosity grows and his leads proliferate, his investigation takes him from Scotland to Belfast. Shocked by the sectarian violence of the past, and by the prejudice and hatred he encounters even now, Conway soon grows obsessed with the story of Lyons and all he represents. And as he digs deeper, he comes to understand that there is indeed a story to be uncovered; and that there are people who will go to great lengths to ensure that it remains hidden • Compelling, vividly written and shocking, All the Colours of the Town is not only the story of an individual and his community – it is also a complex and thrilling inquiry into loyalty, betrayal and duty

This updated edition of the bestselling and wildly popular I Am the Secret Footballer features a new introduction and an additional chapter. The anonymous writer of the Guardian‘s ‘Secret Footballer’ column gives Premier League fans an insider’s look into the unseen world of professional football • ‘It is often said that 95% of what happens in football takes place behind closed doors. Many of these stories I shouldn’t be telling you. But I will.’ • Who is The Secret Footballer? Only a few people know the true identity of the man inside the game. Whoever he is-and whatever team he plays for – TSF is always honest, fearless and opinionated. Here he takes readers past the locker-room door and reveals the inner workings of a professional club, the exhilarating highs and crushing lows, and what it’s really like to do the job most of us can only dream of doing

‘It was the summer that men first walked on the moon. I was very young back then, but did not believe there would ever be a future. I wanted to live dangerously, to push myself as far as I could go, and then see what happened when I got there.’ • So begins the mesmerising narrative of Marco Stanley Fogg – orphan, child of the 1960s, a quester by nature. Moon Palace is his story – a novel that spans three generations, from the early years of this century to the first lunar landings, and moves from the canyons of Manhattan to the cruelly beautiful landscape of the American West. Filled with suspense, unlikely coincidences, wrenching tragedies and marvellous flights of lyricism and erudition, the novel carries the reader effortlessly along with Marco’s search – for love, for his unknown father, and for the key to the elusive riddle of his origins and his fate

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

As hilarious as it is heartbreaking, another future classic from Costa Winner Kate Saunders (Five Children on the Western Front) • Emily watched, in a trance of astonishment, as the bear opened the picnic basket, took out a tartan rug and spread it on Holly’s bed • And then the penguin spoke • Actually spoke • ‘What’s going on? This isn’t Pointed End!’ • The bear said, ‘It looks like a human bedroom. We must’ve come through the wrong door.’ • ‘But there aren’t any doors to the hard world in Deep Smockeroon! And we don’t have a human bedroom any more. We’re in a box in the attic.’ • What if there exists a world powered by imagination? • A world of silliness, where humans and their toys live on long after they’ve left the Hard World . . . and what if the door between that world and this one was broken? • Welcome to the Land of Neverendings

‘This book is a novel in the form of variations. The various parts follow each other like the various stages of a voyage leading into the interior of a theme, the interior of a thought, the interior of a single, unique situation the understanding of which recedes from my sight into the distance. It is a book about laughter and about forgetting, about forgetting and about Prague, about Prague and about the angels.’ • The Book of Laughter and Forgetting is the most secret of Kundera’s novels. This new translation is the first to be fully authorized by Milan Kundera

Casting light on the most serious of problems and at the same time saying not one serious sentence; being fascinated by the reality of the contemporary world and at the same time completely avoiding realism-that's The Festival of Insignificance. Readers who know Kundera's earlier books know that the wish to incorporate an element of the "unserious" in a novel is not at all unexpected of him. In Immortality, Goethe and Hemingway stroll through several chapters together talking and laughing. And in Slowness, Vera, the author's wife, says to her husband: "you've often told me you meant to write a book one day that would have not a single serious word in it... I warn you: watch out. Your enemies are lying in wait." • Now, far from watching out, Kundera is finally and fully realizing his old aesthetic dream in this novel that we could easily view as a summation of his whole work