Winner of the 1990 Independent Award for foreign fiction, this book tells the story of a young Italian scholar who is captured by pirates. Put up for auction at the Istanbul slave market, he is bought by a Turkish servant, eager to learn about scientific and intellectual advances in the West.

A collection of short stories by Russias new writers.

Translated from the Russian, this razor-sharp satire on consumer culture, Russian style, follows the irresistible rise of a Moscow advertising copywriter, who specialises in adjusting Western adverts to the Eastern mentality and selling Pepsi, Seven-up, Gucci, Mercedes and Reebok to the rising middle class.

This novel, by the author of Oscar and Lucinda, tells the story of a man who, recovering from death, is convinced that he is in hell. For the first time in his life, Harry Joy sees the world as it really is, and takes up a notebook to explore and note down the true nature of the Underworld.

Precious stones pass through the hands of many people, hands that leave no apparent trace. But traces are there all the same — impressions, like the atoms of hydrogen drawn to the surface of a diamond. This story charts three lives linked by one such jewel.

The classic collection of nonsense by the greatest nonsensicalist of all time, Edward Lear — inventor of the limerick, and creator of the Jumblies and The Owl and the Pussy Cat.

England, the 1930s. Christopher Banks has become the country's most celebrated detective, his cases the talk of London society. Yet one unsolved crime has always haunted him; the mysterious disappearance of his parents, in Old Shanghai, when he was a small boy. Now, as the world lurches towards total war, Banks realises the time has come for him to return to the city of his childhood and at last solve the mystery — that only by his doing so will civilisation be saved from the approaching catastrophe. Moving between London and Shanghai of the inter-war years, When We Were Orphans is a story of memory, intrigue and the need to return.

Meet Mr Bones, the canine sidekick and confidant of Willy G. Christmas, the brilliant, troubled and altogether original poet-saint from Brooklyn. Like Don Quixote and Sancho Panza before them, they sally forth on a last great adventure...

One of a hand-picked selection of some of the most popular and cult-worthy titles on Faber and Faber's extensive list of film scripts.

«The debut movie by writer-director Kevin Smith, one of a hand-picked selection of some of the most popular and cult-worthy titles on Faber and Faber's extensive list of film scripts. Smith is also writer/director of «Mallrats», «Chasing Amy» and «Dogma».»

All too often, this brilliant novel of thwarted love and revenge miscarried has been read for its political implications. Now, a quarter century after The Joke was first published and several years after the collapse of the Soviet-imposed Czechoslovak regime, it becomes easier to put such implications into perspective in favor of valuing the book (and all Kundera's work) as what it truly is: great, stirring literature that sheds new light on the eternal themes of human existence. The present edition provides English-language readers an important further means toward revaluation of The Joke. For reasons he describes in his Author's Note, Milan Kundera devoted much time to creating (with the assistance of his American publisher-editor) a completely revised translation that reflects his original as closely as any translation possibly can: reflects it in its fidelity not only to the words and syntax but also to the characteristic dictions and tonalities of the novel's narrators. The result is nothing less than the restoration of a classic.

An elderly butler is on a five-day motoring trip through the West Country in the 1950s. The climax of his journey is to be a reunion with his former housekeeper. This 1989 Booker Prize-winner attempts to capture a period in British history and draw a portrait of a man in old age.

Winner of the Academy Award for Best Screenplay and the Palme d`Or at Cannes Film Festival, Pulp Fiction exploded onto the screen in 1994 and transformed the direction of contemporary cinema. This triplet of interwoven crime stories displays Tarantino`s visceral approach to character and plot.

«A novel of irreconcilable loves and infidelities, which embraces all aspects of human existence, and addresses the nature of twentieth-century 'Being'. From the author of «Testaments Betrayed».»

Golding's best-known novel is the story of a group of boys who, after a plane crash, set up a fragile community on a previously uninhabited island. As memories of home recede and the blood from frenzied pig-hunts arouses them, the boys' childish fear turns into something deeper and more primitive.

This is a story told by the wife and four daughters of Nathan Price, a fierce evangelical Baptist who takes his family and mission to the Belgian Congo in 1959.

An elderly butler is on a five-day motoring trip through the West Country in the 1950's. The climax of his journey is to be a reunion with his former housekeeper. This 1989 Booker Prize-winner attempts to capture a period in British history and draw a portrait of a man in old age.

«A novel by the author of «The Unbearable Lightness of Being». A moment of confusion sets in motion a complex chain of events which crosses and recrosses the divide between fantasy and reality.»

After the gravity of The Unbearable Lightness of Being and Immortality, Slowness comes as a surprise: It is certainly Kundera's lightest novel, a divertimento, an opera buffa, with, as the author himself says, not a single serious word in it; then, too, it is the first of his novels to have been written in French (in the eyes of the French public, turning him definitively into a French writer). Disconcerted and enchanted, the reader follows the narrator of Slowness through a midsummer's night in which two tales of seduction, separated by more than 200 years, interweave and oscillate between the sublime and the comic. In the 18th-century narrative, the marvelous Madame de T. summons a young nobleman to her chbteau one evening and gives him an unforgettable lesson in the art of seduction and the pleasures of love. In the same chbteau at the end of the 20th century, a hapless young intellectual experiences a rather less successful night. Distracted by his desire to be the center of public attention at a convention of entomologists, Vincent loses the beautiful Julie — ready and willing though she is to share an evening of intimacy and sexual pleasure with him — and suffers the ridicule of his peers. A morning-after encounter between the two young men from different centuries brings the novel to a poignant close: Vincent has already obliterated the memory of his humiliation as he prepares to speed back to Paris on his motorcycle, while the young nobleman will lie back on the cushions of his carriage and relive the night before in the lingering pleasure of memory. Underlying this libertine fantasy is a profound meditation on contemporary life: about thesecret bond between slowness and memory, about the connection between our era's desire to forget and the way we have given ourselves over to the demon of speed. And about dancers possessed by the passion to be seen, for whom life is merely a perpetual show emptied of every intimacy and every joy. Irresistible... Slowness is an ode to sensuous leisure, to the enjoyment of pleasure rather than just the search for it. Cathleen Schine, Mirabella Audacity, wit, and sheer brilliance. New York Times Book Review Paradoxically, Slowness... is the fastest paced of Kundera's novels as well as the most accessible.

Kundera whirls through comedy and tragedy towards his central question: how does a person, any person, live today? In constructing his answer, he writes of politics, sex, literature, modern man's alienation — and of their antidotes: laughter and forgetting.