Featured
- Books to curl up with this autumnWe asked our authors and staff what they’re reading this season
- Poem of the week'Winter Words' by Sylvia Plath
- Extract: The Red DancerRichard Skinner revisits the life of Mata Hari
Featured
- Books to curl up with this autumnWe asked our authors and staff what they’re reading this season
- Poem of the week'Winter Words' by Sylvia Plath
- Extract: The Red DancerRichard Skinner revisits the life of Mata Hari
New & Recommended
![Mr Lear](http://web.archive.org./web/20171017052648im_/https://www.faber.co.uk/media/catalog/product/cache/1/small_image/400x/040ec09b1e35df139433887a97daa66f/1/9/19926.books.origjpg.jpg)
Acclaimed historian Jenny Uglow brings us a fascinating and beautifully illustrated biography of Edward Lear, full of the colour of the age.
Edward Lear lived a vivid, fascinating, energetic life, but confessed, ‘I hardly enjoy any one thing on earth while it is present.’ He was a man in a hurry, ‘running about on railroads’ from London to country estates and boarding steamships to Italy, Corfu, India and Palestine. He is still loved for his ‘nonsenses’, from startling, joyous limericks to great love songs like ‘The Owl and the Pussy Cat’ and ‘The Dong with a Luminous Nose’, and he is famous, too, for his brilliant natural history paintings, landscapes and travel writing. But although Lear belongs solidly in the age of Darwin and Dickens – he gave Queen Victoria drawing lessons, and his many friends included Tennyson and the Pre-Raphaelite painters – his genius for the absurd and his dazzling word-play make him a very modern spirit. He speaks to us today.
Lear was a man of great simplicity and charm: children adored him, yet his humour masked epilepsy, depression and loneliness. Jenny Uglow’s beautifully illustrated biography, full of the colour of the age, brings us his swooping moods, passionate friendships and restless travels/ Above all it shows how this uniquely gifted man lived all his life on the boundaries of rules and structures, disciplines and desires – an exile of the heart.
![Letters of Sylvia Plath Volume I](http://web.archive.org./web/20171017052648im_/https://www.faber.co.uk/media/catalog/product/cache/1/small_image/400x/040ec09b1e35df139433887a97daa66f/2/3/23272.books.origjpg.jpg)
The Letters of Sylvia Plath Volume I: 1940–1956
Sylvia Plath (1932–1963) was one of the writers that defined the course of twentieth-century poetry. Her vivid, daring and complex poetry continues to captivate new generations of readers and writers.
In the Letters, we discover the art of Plath’s correspondence, most of which has never before been published and is here presented unabridged, without revision, so that she speaks directly in her own words. Refreshingly candid and offering intimate details of her personal life, Plath is playful, too, entertaining a wide range of addressees, including family, friends and professional contacts, with inimitable wit and verve.
The letters document Plath’s extraordinary literary development: the genesis of many poems, short and long fiction, and journalism. Her endeavour to publish in a variety of genres had mixed receptions, but she was never dissuaded. Through acceptance of her work, and rejection, Plath strove to stay true to her creative vision. Well-read and curious, she offers a fascinating commentary on contemporary culture.
Leading Plath scholars Peter K. Steinberg and Karen V. Kukil, editor of The Journals of Sylvia Plath 1950–1962, provide comprehensive footnotes and an extensive index informed by their meticulous research. Alongside a selection of photographs and Plath’s own line-drawings, the editors masterfully contextualise what the pages disclose.
This selection of early correspondence marks the key moments of Plath’s adolescence, including childhood hobbies and high school boyfriends; her successful but turbulent undergraduate years at Smith College; the move to England and Cambridge University; and her meeting and marrying Ted Hughes, including a trove of unseen letters post-honeymoon, revealing their extraordinary creative partnership.
![The Secret Life of Cows](http://web.archive.org./web/20171017052648im_/https://www.faber.co.uk/media/catalog/product/cache/1/small_image/400x/040ec09b1e35df139433887a97daa66f/2/7/27836.books.origjpg.jpg)
WITH A FOREWORD BY ALAN BENNETT
'A lovely, thoughtful little book about the intelligence of cows.' James Rebanks, author of The Shepherd's Life
Cows are as varied as people. They can be highly intelligent or slow to understand, vain, considerate, proud, shy or inventive.
Although much of a cow’s day is spent eating, they always find time for extra-curricular activities such as babysitting, playing hide and seek, blackberry-picking or fighting a tree.
This is an affectionate record of a hitherto secret world.
![Sugar Money](http://web.archive.org./web/20171017052648im_/https://www.faber.co.uk/media/catalog/product/cache/1/small_image/400x/040ec09b1e35df139433887a97daa66f/2/7/27838.books.origjpg.jpg)
Martinique, 1765, and brothers Emile and Lucien are charged by their French master, Father Cleophas, with a mission. They must return to Grenada, the island they once called home, and smuggle back the 42 slaves claimed by English invaders at the hospital plantation in Fort Royal. While Lucien, barely in his teens, sees the trip as a great adventure, the older and worldlier Emile has no illusions about the dangers they will face. But with no choice other than to obey Cleophas - and sensing the possibility, however remote, of finding his first love Celeste - he sets out with his brother on this ‘reckless venture’.
With great characters, a superb narrative set up, and language that is witty, bawdy and thrillingly alive, Sugar Money is a novel to treasure.