Thoughts of Sorts, one of Georges Perec's final works, was published posthumously in France in 1985. With this translation, David Bellos, Perec's preeminent translator, has completed the Godine list of Perec's great works translated into English and has provided an introduction to this master of "systematic versatility." Thoughts of Sorts is a compilation of musings and essays attempting to circumscribe, in Perec's words, "my experience of the world not in terms of the reflections it casts in distant places, but at its actual point of breaking surface." Perec investigates the ways by which we define our place in the world, reveling in listmaking, orientating, classifying. This book employs all of the modes of questioning explored by his previous books, and at the same time breaks new ground of its own, ending with a question mark in typical/atypical Perec fashion.

Great writers, artists, musicians and thinkers in British life say what Europe means to them: an outpouring of love and sadness. With pieces from Frank Cottrell Boyce, Melvyn Bragg, Margaret Drabble, Alan Hollinghurst, Will Hutton, Holly Johnson, Penelope Lively, Jonathan Meades, Deborah Moggach, Alan Moore, Jackie Morris, Cathy Rentzenbrink, Chris Riddle, Tony Robinson, Pete Townshend, Kate Williams, Michael Wood and many more... As Britain pulls away from Europe great British writers come together to give voice to their innermost feelings. Contributing essays that contain some of their finest writings and perspectives very different to the ones given in news outlets. The creative community here has its say on Brexit. Novelists, artists, comedians, historians, biographers, nature writers, film writers, travel writers, people young and old and from an extraordinary range of backgrounds. Most are famous perhaps because they have won the Booker or other literary prizes, written bestsellers, changed the face of popular culture or sold millions of records. Others are not yet household names but write with depth of insight and feeling. There is some extraordinary writing in this book. Some of these pieces are expressions of love of particular places in Europe. Some are true stories, some nostalgic, many hopeful. There are hilarious pieces. There are cries of pain and regret. Some pieces are quietly devastating. All are passionate. They show how Europe has helped us to expand our emotional, intellectual and artistic bandwidth, and hopefully will continue to do just that. Contributors include: Mary Beard, Jeffrey Boakye, Melvyn Bragg, Simon Callow, B. Catling, Shami Chakrabarti, Chris Cleave, Frank Cottrell Boyce, William Dalrymple, Lindsey Davis, Margaret Drabble, Tracey Emin, Michel Faber, Sebastian Faulks, Neil Gaiman, Evelyn Glennie, Alan Hollinghurst, Will Hutton, Holly Johnson, Ruth Jones, A.L. Kennedy, Hermione Lee, Prue Leith, Roger Lewis, Penelope Lively, Richard Mabey, Jonathan Meades, Andrew Miller, Deborah Moggach, Alan Moore, Paul Morley, Jackie Morris, Charles Nicholl, Irenosen Okojie, Onjali Q. Rauf, Chris Riddell, Tony Robinson, J.K. Rowling, Rhik Samadder, Isy Suttie, Sandi Toksvig, Pete Townshend, Kate Williams and Michael Wood.

Paul Ableman's modern masterpiece was first published by the Olympia Press of Paris in 1958, to instant acclaim. The narrator of I Hear Voices is a young schizophrenic who transports himself, and the reader, through a wondrously transfigured city where the real and the fantastic blend together in a seamless enchantment. The continual stream and buzz of events is often comical, occasionally wrenching, and always unpredictable. Encounters with Miss Carpet, The Commissioner, Merkitt and Mrs Oil, among others, are filled with poignant satire and disquieting honesty in this vision of the fragmentation of contemporary life. This Faber Finds edition of I Hear Voices includes a preface by Margaret Drabble: her obituary for Paul Ableman, who died in 2006. 'The book, not excluding Lolita, which gave me the greatest pride and pleasure to publish.' Maurice Girodias 'A strikingly fresh and original work of art... The writing is brilliant; both terrifying and hilariously funny.' Philip Toynbee, Observer 'Subtle, humorous, clinically authentic.' Times Literary Supplement

First published in 1962 As Near as I Can Get was Paul Ableman's follow up to his critically acclaimed debut I Hear Voices. Following Alan Peebles, a young man struggling to become a poet, As Near as I Can depicts a mid-twentieth century London of offices, pubs and lodgings. Fuelled by drink through these desperate years, the narrator charts his encounters with women and fellow artists, as he seeks to glimpse a wonder in life barely discernible beneath the routine of every day. 'Paul Ableman's novels were praised for their inventive language, bawdy high spirits, and originality of form by Anthony Burgess, Philip Toynbee, Robert Nye and other friends of the avant-garde. They are witty, original, and full of good humour, and I am delighted Faber Finds are reissuing them.' Margaret Drabble

'This book seems to be about us. Within a day or two of starting it I devised a title: VAC... The subtle idea was to fuse the suggestion of holiday or vacation with that of vacuum...' Paul Ableman's third novel, first published in 1968, is - through the voice of its narrator Billy Soodernim, libidinous and regretful by turns - a meditation on love and carnality, monogamy and promiscuity, childbirth, separation and indeed the whole of the fraught relations between the sexes: 'male and female, citizens with distinct personalities, flesh inwraught in flesh.' 'Paul Ableman's novels were praised for their inventive language, bawdy high spirits, and originality of form by Anthony Burgess, Philip Toynbee, Robert Nye and other friends of the avant-garde. They are witty, original, and full of good humour, and I am delighted Faber Finds are reissuing them.' Margaret Drabble

The hero of Paul Ableman's Vilp (1962) is Clive Witt, a novelist in search of a hero for his new novel. He advertises for suitable applicants, and from seventy-three replies he selects three: Professor Guthrie Pidge, a zoologist; Pad Dee Murphy, an Irish-Burmese peasant; and Harry Glebe, the inventor of the renowned earth-borer. Clive's novel, though, progresses slowly. His three heroes refuse to mix their very disparate elements into a harmonious whole. Eventually, Clive scraps it and harnesses his team of heroes to a new work, an exciting science fiction tale called The Silver Spores. In this, mankind meets the Vilp! The novel ends with the 5,000 strong Vilp Galactic Council communing in space at an incredibly high telepathic level. 'Excellent... vital, taut, brilliantly imaginative' Anthony Burgess

Tornado Pratt is the last of the old-style American tycoons, one who has lived his life with ferocious vigour through the vacillating fortunes of the twentieth-century USA. Paul Ableman's novel finds him in a hotel room at the end of his days, as he recounts via a dying monologue the events of his turbulent life. What is revealed, in a testimony full of jokes and surprises, is a brash, lustful, comic, profane, naive and sentimental man who, driven on by remorse, displays a wry and perceptive honesty about himself, even as his memories begin to merge with imaginings. Often funny and sometimes moving, Tornado Pratt's voice is an unforgettable one in which he confronts his own mortality, and in which Paul Ableman gives us an astonishing, affecting and life-affirming story. Auberon Waugh called Tornado Pratt 'a magnificent and memorable novel'.

'A joyous collection of essays celebrating the sanctuary of the women's pond on Hampstead Heath.' - New Statesman

Tucked away along a shady path towards the north-east edge of Hampstead Heath is a sign: Women Only. This is the Kenwood Ladies' Bathing Pond.

Floating in the Pond's silky waters, hidden by a canopy of trees, it's easy to forget that you are in the middle of London. On a hot day, thousands of swimmers from eight to eighty-plus can be found waiting to take a dip before sunbathing in the adjoining meadow. As summer turns to autumn and then winter, the Pond is still visited by a large number of hardy regulars in high-vis hats, many of whom have been swimming here for decades.

In these essays we see the Pond from the perspectives of writers who have swum there. Esther Freud describes the life-affirming sensation of swimming through the seasons; Lou Stoppard pays tribute to the winter swimmers who break the ice; Margaret Drabble reflects on the golden Hampstead days of her youth; Sharlene Teo visits for the first time; and Nell Frizzell shares the view from her yellow lifeguard's canoe.

Combining personal reminiscence with reflections on the history of the place over the years and through the changing seasons, At the Pond captures fourteen contemporary writers' impressions of this unique place.

Arnold Bennett was born in a street called Hope Street. A street less hopeful it would be hard to imagine.' Thus begins Margaret Drabble's biography of a man whose most famous achievement was to re-create, in such novels as The Old Wives' Tale and Clayhanger, the life, atmosphere and character of the 'Five Towns' region in which he was born and grew up. Arnold Bennett is a very personal book. 'What interests me', writes the author, 'is Bennett's background, his childhood and origins, for they are very similar to my own. My mother's family came from the Potteries, and the Bennett novels seem to me to portray a way of life that still existed when I was a child, and indeed persists in certain areas. So like all books this has been partly an act of self-exploration.' Of Bennett as a writer Drabble says 'The best books I think are very fine indeed, on the highest level, deeply moving, original and dealing with material that I had never before encountered in fiction, but only in life: I feel they have been underrated, and my response to them is so constant, even after years of work on them and constant re-readings, that I want to communicate enthusiasm.' Of Bennett as a man she paints an affectionate portrait, not glossing over the irritability, dyspepsia and rigidity which at times made him so difficult a companion but reminding us too of his honesty, kindliness and sensitivity. 'Many a time,' she writes at the end of the book, 're-reading a novel, reading a letter or a piece of his Journal, I have wanted to shake his hand, or to thank him, to say well done. I have written this instead.

Angus Wilson was a critic, lecturer and man of letters. Pre-eminently though he was a novelist, indeed, in the words of Paul Bailey 'no other novelist of his generation offered as complete and detailed a portrait of English society.' His first volume of stories, The Wrong Set (1949) - reissued in Faber Finds - launched Wilson as one of the most controversial, colourful and entertaining figures on the post-war literary scene, and he rapidly developed into a major novelist, maturing from enfant terrible to elder statesman in the process. Margaret Drabble's biography traces the influences of his bizarrely extended family, his years as a librarian at the British Museum - interrupted by a grim spell in the code-breaking huts at Bletchley Park - and his unexpected liberation as a writer. It portrays the dizzying progress of a writer and enthusiast whose work was at the forefront of English fiction for the second-half of the twentieth-century: above all it is a portrait of an artist of enormous courage, a man who confronted challenge to the very end. In his later years he became both influence and mentor for a younger generation of writers, including Ian McEwan, Rose Tremain and Margaret Drabble herself. Margaret Drabble knew Angus Wilson from the late 1960s and her biography is enriched with personal knowledge and recollections. 'He has been fortunate in his biographer . . . Altogether, with the assistance and consent of Tony Garrett, the dedicatee and second hero of the book, she has given a minute, intimate and candid account . . . of Wilson's hectic life.' Frank Kermode, London Review of Books 'A solid tribute of scholarship and affection' Penelope Fitzgerald, Independent 'No one interested in the story of modern fiction can fail to find this life fascinating. Its virtues - a bright, crowded canvas, warmth, a witty, polished style - are those of Wilson's novels . . . Through it all shines so human a picturer of a courageous, doubting, eccentric, driven writer.' Jackie Wullschlager, Financial Times

Simon Camish, a resentful insecure barrister in a stifling marriage, would not have particularly noticed Rose Vassiliou had he not been asked to drive her home one night after a dinner party. Now, separated from her Greek husband, Rose lives alone with her three children. Despite all the efforts and sneers of her friends, she refuses to move from her crumbling house in a decaying neighbourhood to which she has become attached. Gradually drawn further and further into her affairs, Simon becomes aware that Rose is a woman of remarkable integrity and courage. 'Though I have admired Miss Drabble's writing for years, I will admit that nothing she has written in the past quite prepared me for the depth and richness of this book' - Joyce Carol Oates

1979. Three old Cambridge friends are brought together at a party to celebrate New Year's Eve and the end of a decade. Esther, Liz and Alix first met in Cambridge in the early Fifties, a time when their futures held glittering promise. But with the dawn of the Thatcher era, everything changed. Now middle-aged, how will these confident women cope with the personal and professional challenges they will come to face? 'A sublime example of Drabble's mastery in unravelling the intricacies of intimate relationships' - The Times

Winner of John Llewellyn Rhys Prize, The Millstone is a radical celebration of the mother-child relationship. It is the Swinging Sixties, and Rosamund Stacey is young and inexperienced at a time when sexual liberation is well on its way. She conceals her ignorance beneath a show of independence, and becomes pregnant as a result of a one-night stand. Although single parenthood is still not socially acceptable, she chooses to have the baby rather than to seek an illegal abortion, and finds her life transformed by motherhood. 'Rosamund is marvellous, a true Drabble heroine' - Sunday Times

One hot summer afternoon in South Yorkshire, Faro sits at a lecture on genetic inheritance. She has travelled from London to the Northern mining town where generations of her family have lived and worked, to explore her own past. Decades before, in the early twentieth century, Bessie Bawtry also ponders her place in the world. A child of unusual determination and precocious intelligence, she longs for the day she will eventually escape the working-class life her ancestor would never have dreamt of leaving. The Peppered Moth explores the way we are shaped by our environment and ancestry, told with elegant prose, wry humour and captivating storytelling, through the story of one family across generations through the twentieth century. 'Margaret Drabble is writing, not about an individual, but about a generation, or two, or more - of women . . . This is a sad tale, tenderly told, embedded in a robust family chronicle' - Doris Lessing

In her witty, masterful debut novel, Margaret Drabble conjures a gripping story of sibling rivalry. Louise, beautiful and sophisticated, marries wealthy novelist Stephen Fairfax. Sarah, recently graduated from Oxford, is thrown back into family matters. Louise's life becomes one of parties, gossip columns and glamour. Sarah, now in London, begins to discover a newfound freedom, only glimpsing her sister's fashionable life. But as rumours of infidelity in Louise's marriage surface, Sarah finds that her sister, beneath her cool exterior, may not be the woman she thought she was. 'Margaret Drabble's early novels were intimate and sprightly chronicles of the small dissatisfactions and small triumphs of young women like herself' - Hilary Mantel

Known for both its industrial roots and arboreal abundance, Sheffield has always been a city of two halves. From elegant parks and gardens to brutalist high-rise estates and the hinterland nightclubs of 'Centertainment', it is a city caught between the forges of the past and the melting pot of the present. Bringing together new short stories from some of the city's most celebrated writers, The Book of Sheffield traces the contours of this complex landscape from both sides of the economic dividing line. From the aspirations of young creatives, ultimately driven to leave, to the more immediate demands of refugees, scrap metal collectors, and student radicals, these stories offer ten different look-out points from which to gaze down on the ever-changing face of the 'Steel City'.

A fascinating, hilarious, and timeless coming-of-age tale featuring one of Jane Austen's most memorable characters. Emma Woodhouse, handsome, clever, and rich, with a comfortable home and happy disposition had lived nearly twenty-one years in the world with very little to distress or vex her. The celebrated opening of Jane Austen s Emma introduces readers to a supremely self-assured and accomplished young woman who believes herself immune to romance. By turns brilliant and foolish, self-aware and self-deluding, Emma leaps from error to error, writes Margaret Drabble in her incisive Introduction, wreaking comic havoc in the lives of those around her. The mature flowering of Austen s singular and prolific genius, Emma is the compelling story of a woman seeking her true nature and finding true love in the process. With an Introduction by Margaret Drabbleand an Afterword by Sabrina Jeffries"

The princess is taking her over, bodily and mentally. Dr Babs Halliwell is no longer herself. A young girl is plucked from obscurity to marry the Crown Prince of Korea. In her diaries, she chronicles the intrigues of courtly life and her own extraordinary existence. Two hundred years later, the Red Queen's ghost haunts Dr Babs Halliwell, an Oxford academic obsessed with her memoirs and possessed by the many parallels with her own complicated past. But why and how does she keep the Red Queen's story alive? The inimitable Margaret Drabble offers a rich and atmospheric historical novel, where the dead wander among the living and ask what it means to be remembered.

Ailsa and Humphrey met as children by a grey, northern sea in post-war Britain. She, freckled and furious; he, quietly studious; both fascinated by the other. Years later, their lives collide as adults and burst into an intense yet brief love affair. Now, after thirty years apart and at the close of the 20th century, their lives are converging once again as they hurtle towards each other by plane and train - their motivations, regrets and decisions laid bare. With the gloriously astute eye that Margaret Drabble is celebrated for, The Sea Lady is an account of first and last love; of the lapping of time at our ankles, gradually eroding and shaping our lives.

The love of place is endemic in English literature, from the work of the earliest poets and hermits to the suburban celebrations of John Betjeman. Here, the renowned author Margaret Drabble presents an image of Britain as seen by writers of different regions and periods, illuminating the ways in which their work has shaped our visual attitudes, taste in landscape, and relation to nature. For this new edition of her engaging study, Ms. Drabble has made corrections and updates to the text throughout and written a new epilogue.

Brought up in a suffocating, emotionless home in the north of England, Clara finds freedom when she wins a scholarship and moves to London. There, she meets Clelia and the rest of the brilliant and charming Denham family; they dazzle Clara with their gift for life, and Clara longs to be part of their bohemian world. But while she will do anything to join their circle, she gives no thought to the chaos that she may cause . . . 'Drabble presents characters who are not passively witnessing their lives (and ours); she is not a writer who reflects the helplessness of the stereotyped "sick society", but one who has taken upon herself the task, largely ignored today, of attempting the active, vital, energetic, mysterious re-creation of a set of values by which human beings can live' - Joyce Carol Oates

Anna is a child of special, unknowable qualities. She is happy, always willing to smile at the world around her, but she also presents profound challenges. For her mother Jess, still in her early 20s, her arrival will prove life-transforming. Over the course of decades, in ways large and small, Anna will affect the lives and loves of those around her. While Anna herself will remain largely unaltered by the passing years, she will live through a period of dramatic change, her journey illuminating our shifting attitudes towards motherhood, responsibility and the way we care for one another.

Gathered together in one hardcover volume: three timeless novels from the founding father of science fiction.
The first great novel to imagine time travel, "The Time Machine" (1895) follows its scientist narrator on an incredible journey that takes him finally to Earth's last moments--and perhaps his own. The scientist who discovers how to transform himself in "The Invisible Man" (1897) will also discover, too late, that he has become unmoored from society and from his own sanity. "The War of the Worlds" (1898)--the seminal masterpiece of alien invasion adapted by Orson Welles for his notorious 1938 radio drama, and subsequently by several filmmakers--imagines a fierce race of Martians who devastate Earth and feed on their human victims while their voracious vegetation, the red weed, spreads over the ruined planet.
Here are three classic science fiction novels that, more than a century after their original publication, show no sign of losing their grip on readers' imaginations.