FaberBooks

'I need to make these two men one: the warm, embracing man I adored, and the indifferent, sometimes self-centered, occasionally cruel man who could drink too much, could be crushing, contemptuous, defeating, deadening - this is hard.' So says Judy Golding, writing about her father, William Golding, as she publishes her extraordinary memoir, 'The Children of Lovers' in the year of the centenary of...

In her first book The Observations Jane Harris gave us the very memorable Bessie. In her new book Gillespie and I we meet the equally unforgettable Harriet Baxter, a Londoner who moves to Glasgow for the 1888 International Exhibition and there meets the Gillespie family, before events take a sinister turn and lead to a shocking act and criminal trial that grips the nation. Intrigued? Our Glasgow-b...

We are delighted to be joined for this month's Faber Podcast by Professor Lewis Wolpert, who discusses his new book You're Looking Very Well and talks us through both the science of ageing and our response as a society to our advancing years. We also speak to Andrew Martin, the creator of the enjoyable Jim Stringer series, which now (in The Somme Stations) sees the Edwardian Railway Detective head...

In one of his previous books - Malignant Sadness - Professor Lewis Wolpert drew on personal experience to explore the subject of clinical depression, but now, in You're Looking Very Well, he examines the process of ageing, 'the surprising nature of getting old'. Not just the science of ageing, but how we, as individuals and as a society, cope with old age.

Andrew Martin is the author of the Jim Stringer series, detective novels set during Edwardian times that began with The Necropolis Railway in 2002. The seventh and latest instalment is The Somme Stations, in which Stringer leaves his home in York for the front lines of the Somme, as part of the North-Eastern Railway Battalion, aka The Railway Pals. But the men under his charge turn out to be far f...

"April is the cruellest month..." In a rare recording from 1933, T.S. Eliot reads an extract from The Waste Land. Part of The Waste Land app for iPad, now available to download in the App Store: http://bit.ly/kJATn3

Ted Hughes reads an extract from The Waste Land by T.S. Eliot. Part of The Waste Land app for iPad, now available to download in the App Store: http://bit.ly/kJATn3

Viggo Mortensen reads an extract from The Waste Land by T.S. Eliot. Part of The Waste Land app for iPad, now available to download in the App Store: http://bit.ly/kJATn3

Since 1988, when her first novel The Bean Trees was published, Barbara Kingsolver has become one of the world's most admired writers. Her 1998 novel The Poisonwood Bible was picked for Oprah's Book Club and was shortlisted for the Orange Prize. In 2010 she went one better, winning the Orange Prize for Fiction with The Lacuna. We were thrilled that she found time on a flying visit to the UK in July...

With Occupied City, David Peace is two-thirds of the way through his Tokyo trilogy. In the first book, Tokyo Year Zero, the setting was a city in the time of defeat. With his latest book it's a city under occupation. The novel's background is the very real (and famous) Hirosawa poisoning case in which 12 people died. Find out what David Peace had to say, including the reason for using 12 different...

In this rare, 30-minute interview with P. D. James, the doyenne of British Crime tells us about her writing career, which began with the publication of Cover Her Face in 1962. She recalls the years spent developing her craft and the evolution of Adam Dalgliesh, the writers that inspired her, and the role of detective fiction in today's society. A real treat for Crime Fiction fans.

In part two of our interview we discuss Kazuo Ishiguro's earlier books, including the Booker Prize-winning The Remains of the Day and The Unconsoled, which on publication baffled critics but is now viewed as one of the author's greatest achievements. There's discussion too of Ishiguro's childhood and memories of Japan, and what he's working on next. Here's part one of our interview: http://soundcl...

In a special two-part interview, George Miller talks to Kazuo Ishiguro about his new book Nocturnes, a collection of longish short stories with related themes of music and night, and ambition and disappointment. Under discussion are the challenges of writing in an unfamiliar form, and Ishiguro's approach to writing comedy. Here's the second part of the interview: https://soundcloud.com/faberbooks/...

In this extended interview, Sebastian Barry speaks about the many histories of Ireland and, even closer to home, remnants of his own family history to be found in his new book The Secret Scripture in the fictional shape of Roseanne McNulty, one of the novel's two narrators, confined to an asylum for sixty years. .

The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao was the long-awaited first novel from one of today’s most original and electrifying literary voices, Junot Diaz. The book was published early in 2008, which is when we were lucky enough to welcome Junot to the Faber offices, and when he gave this great interview.

In this latest Faber Podcast, recorded in March 2011, our interviewer George Miller meets Edna O'Brien, doyenne of Irish literature and author of numerous books and plays spanning a period of six decades. Edna tells us about her new book of stories, Saints and Sinners, and reveals her writing methods, influences and a progress report on her forthcoming memoir. We also speak to Indian novelist Manj...

We welcomed Indian novelist Manju Kapur to the Faber offices in March 2011 as she arrived in the UK from New Delhi to promote her fifth book Custody. Her first book Difficult Daughters won a Commonwealth First Book Award, was a number one bestseller in India and has become a firm favourite with reading groups. Each of her books has charted the effects of a changing India - in a time of increased g...

Edna O'Brien first achieved fame and notoriety with The Country Girls, which was banned in Ireland. For fifty years she has written novels, short stories, plays and criticism. Saints and Sinners, her new book of stories, is the first of her fiction to be published by Faber and she discusses the book - along with her writing methods and experimentation, influential writers and the lasting importanc...

Since her debut novel 'The Country Girls', Edna O'Brien has written over twenty works of fiction along with biographies of James Joyce and Lord Byron. 'Saints and Sinners' is her new collection of stories, and here is Edna reading an extract from the first story in the book, 'Shovel Kings'.

From her new collection of stories 'Saints and Sinners', here's the wonderful Edna O'Brien - the doyenne of Irish literature - reading an extract from 'My Two Mothers'. A moving and memorable passage, that should have you wanting to read more yourself.

This month our regular interviewer George Miller speaks to the Guardian's Jonathan Watts about his new book When a Billion Chinese Jump, his unrivalled eye-witness account of China's industrial rise and the consequent impact on its people and environment. He also speaks to David Olusoga, co-author of The Kaiser's Holocaust, about 19th-century colonialism, in particular Germany's incursion into Afr...

The Guardian's Asia Environment correspondent Jonathan Watts has spent eight years in China and has witnessed China's growing industrial might, and the consequent impact on the nation's people and environment. When a Billion Chinese Jump is his assessment of what's become a critical situation for the entire planet.

The Kaiser's Holocaust is David Olusoga's (with co-author Casper Erichsen) chilling account of Germany's bid in the 19th century to become an African colonial power - a venture which took a genocidal turn and, the authors argue, was one of the roots of Nazism.

In our latest Faber Podcast we speak to Norman Lebrecht and Francis Spufford. They both address similar questions in their books: how do you capture the essence of real lives; how do you escape some of the constraints of conventional non-fiction and biography; and how can you borrow some of the novelist's techniques and still remain faithful to your subjects. In Why Mahler? and Red Plenty, Lebrech...

Red Plenty' is a book that's very hard to pin down. It's fictionalised non-fiction. Some of its characters are real, others invented. Here to tell us more for the Faber Podcast is the author, Francis Spufford.