Showing results by publisher "Faber & Faber" in Romance

Deep in Essex and her own thoughts, Sophie had a feeling something was going to happen and then it did. Chris has entered the pub and re-entered her life after Sophie had finally stopped thinking about him and regretting what she'd done. Sophie has a chance at creating a new ending and paying off her emotional debts (if not her financial ones). All she has to do is act exactly like a normal, well-adjusted person and not say any of her inner monologue out loud. If she can suppress her paranoia, pornographic visualisations and lying maybe she'll even end up getting the guy she wants?

Connell and Marianne grow up in the same small town in the west of Ireland, but the similarities end there. In school, Connell is popular and well-liked, while Marianne is a loner. But when the two strike up a conversation—awkward but electrifying—something life-changing begins. Normal People is a story of mutual fascination, friendship and love. It takes us from that first conversation to the years beyond, in the company of two people who try to stay apart but find they can't.

Alice, a novelist, meets Felix, who works in a distribution warehouse and asks him if he'd like to travel to Rome with her. In Dublin, her best friend, Eileen, is getting over a break-up and slips back into flirting with Simon, a man she has known since childhood. Alice, Felix, Eileen and Simon are still young—but life is catching up with them.

In the bedroom above her immense studio at Burntcoat, the celebrated sculptor Edith Harkness is making her final preparations. Her life will draw to an end in the coming days. Downstairs, the studio is a crucible glowing with memories and desire. It was here, when the first lockdown came, that she brought Halit. The lover she barely knew. A presence from another culture. A doorway into a new and feverish world.

It's the opportunity of a lifetime: Feyi is about to be given the chance to escape the City's blistering heat for a dream island holiday: poolside cocktails, beach sunsets, and elaborate meals. And as the sun goes down on her old life, our heroine also might just be ready to open her heart to someone new. The only problem is, she's falling for the one man she absolutely can't have.

Frances is 21 years-old, cool-headed and observant. A student in Dublin and an aspiring writer, at night she performs spoken word with her best friend Bobbi, who used to be her girlfriend. When they are interviewed and then befriended by Melissa, a well-known journalist who is married to Nick, an actor, they enter a world of beautiful houses, raucous dinner parties and holidays in Provence. But when Frances and Nick get unexpectedly closer, the sharply witty and emotion-averse Frances is forced to honestly confront her own vulnerabilities for the first time.

From a youthful infatuation with a cabinet maker in a small Italian fishing village, to a passionate yet sporadic affair with a woman in New York, to an obsession with a man he meets at a tennis court, Enigma Variations charts one man's path through the great loves of his life. André Aciman casts a shimmering light over each facet of desire, to probe how we ache, want, and waver, and ultimately how we sometimes falter and let go of the very ones we want the most.

Tonight 19-year-old William Lavery is dressed for success, his first black-tie do. It's the Midlands Chapter of the Institute of Embalmers Ladies' Night Dinner Dance, and William is taking Gloria in her sequined evening gown. He can barely believe his luck. But as the guests sip their drinks and smoke their post-dinner cigarettes, a telegram delivers news of a tragedy. An event so terrible it will shake the nation. It is October 1966, and a landslide at a coal mine has buried a school: Aberfan.

On the Appalachian Mountains above her home, a young mother discovers a beautiful and terrible marvel of nature. As the world around her is suddenly transformed by a seeming miracle, can the old certainties they have lived by for centuries remain unchallenged? Flight Behaviour is a captivating, topical and deeply human story touching on class, poverty and climate change. It explores the truths we live by, and the complexities that lie behind them.

In Nocturnes, a sublime story cycle, Kazuo Ishiguro explores ideas of love, music and the passing of time. From the piazzas of Italy to the Malvern Hills, a London flat to the "hush-hush floor" of an exclusive Hollywood hotel, the characters we encounter range from young dreamers to cafe musicians to faded stars, all of them at some moment of reckoning. Gentle, intimate, and witty, this quintet is marked by a haunting theme: the struggle to keep alive a sense of life's romance, even as one gets older.

Mira's days are filled with duty and light on freedom. In a new country, living with a husband she barely knows - and who she fears she'll never love - Mira is desperate to discover all that her new life in England might offer. And then there's Tahliil. The quiet, beautiful man she sees at work each day. With a depth in his eyes and a face full of questions. The first person in this new world who listens to Mira's hopes for who she yearns to become.

This is the tale of four women. Four lives, connected and controlled by one man: the notorious, charismatic gangster Boysie Singh. Pull up a chair and let these women tell of the man they believed could love, help or free them, and how some of them survived to tell a tale at all.

Summer, 1991. Dean: sun-stung and sticky with cool ice-pop juice, walks to the middle of The Green to get a good gawk at the new salon. And at the owner's kid. Hands deep in his pockets, his jet-black mop of hair hides the tension in his face and shoulders at the thought of going back home. Shauna: stands well hid behind her ma - her eyes dark and haunted like the rest of her. The salon is theirs, a fresh start. The smell of her ma's Body Shop perfume clings to her jumper - Shauna can't be anywhere else other than here. Instantly inseparable, their friendship blooms.

Dorothy is a grieving housewife in the Californian suburbs. Her infant son, unborn child and dog have all just died; her husband is unfaithful; her only friend is an alcoholic. One day, she is doing chores when the radio announces that a green-skinned sea monster has escaped from the Institute for Oceanographic Research - but little did she expect him to arrive in her kitchen. Muscular yet gentle, vegetarian, sexually magnetic and excellent at housework, Larry the frogman is a revelation: and their passionate affair goes beyond their wildest dreams.

Irena and Josef meet by chance while returning to their homeland, which they had abandoned 20 years earlier. 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'.

Maggie Millner's seductive debut is a novel-in-verse about a woman in her late twenties who leaves a long-term relationship with a boyfriend for another woman. The affair thrusts her from an outwardly conventional life into queerness, polyamory, kink, and unalloyed, consuming desire. What ensues is an exploration of obsession, gender, identity-making, sexual experiment, and the art and act of literary transformation.

In one unforgettable night, Max Spiegelman's life splits in two. As war looms and Nazism continues to rise, Max is forced into choices that place him and his alter ego on opposing sides of a divided world. Tethered by their dreams, the boys watch helplessly, haunted by visions of what could have been. But in each parallel universe, they share a magnetic bond with an enchanting, grey-eyed girl.

Ralph Loman works in an unsatisfying job, for a free London newspaper, when Francine Snaith, a temporary secretary for a corporate finance firm, unexpectedly crosses his path at a party. Her beauty ignites a blaze of excitement in his troubled heart. But Francine is ravenous for attention, driven by a thirst for conquest and when Ralph tries politely to extricate himself, he finds he is bound by chains of consequence from which it seems there is no escape.

Mika is about to turn twenty-five, and all she has to show for it is a soul-sucking office job and a terminal case of virginity. Between the pervy salarymen she works with and the pretty boys she pines after, Mika is ready to explode. But it's summer in Tokyo, AKA peacock season. Time to strut her stuff. So when her certified Hot Girl bestie sends her the invite for an upcoming beach party, Mika clicks 'attending'. Just when she thinks real life is never going to live up to the wild fantasies her imagination cooks up, someone new catches her eye.

Welsey Cunningham grew up running barefoot through the orchards of his Quaker family farm, working with horses and dreaming of one day building himself a house on his own patch of ground above the river. The Second World War interrupted those dreams: it took Wes to New Guinea as a medic and then sent him home with healing bullet wounds in his legs. While Wes was away, life in Almond Tree continued but everyone's been changed by the war.