Faber & Faber

The Nobel Lecture Seamus Heaney received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1995 'for works of lyrical beauty and ethical depth, which exalt the every day miracles and the living past'. Crediting Poetry is the first publication of the lecture he delivered at the Swedish Academy on 7 December 1995.

Each of these chapters in this book of political counterfactuals describes a premiership that never happened, but might easily have done had the chips fallen slightly differently. The contributors, each of them experts in political history, have asked themselves questions like: what shape would the welfare state and the cold war have taken if the Prime Minister had been Herbert Morrison instead of Clement Attlee? What would have been consequences for Northern Ireland had Norman Tebbit succeeded Margaret Thatcher? How would our present life be different without New Labour - a name we would never have heard if either Kinnock or Smith had become Prime Minister and not Tony Blair? Each of the chapters in this book describes events that really might have happened. And almost did.

Chris Beckett grew up in 1960s Ethiopia, a country he describes as a 'barefoot empire, home of black-maned lions… old priests decked out like butterflies and blazing young singers of Ethio-jazz'. Ethiopia Boy plunges the reader into praise poems that sing and boast and glory in the colours and textures of this extraordinary country. Here is a world of feasting on spicy kikwot and of famine sucking the water from rivers, of lion buses and a prayer child, where Earth sings greetings to the feet that walk on her. Haunted by the memory of his friend Abebe, the cook's son, Beckett celebrates and laments a lost boyhood in poems of vivid immediacy.

Evas teaching career is seriously, and humorously, on the rocks. She loves her job, but is finding it harder by the minute to take her employer seriously. More and more Eva takes refuge in her mothers home city of Prague. She finds its cultural roots go back further than she could ever have imagined. As she shambles and laughs her way through school, Eva delves into the inspiring history of the city she loves. She is transformed by what she discovers. But will she find the links between Prague, North Yorkshire, the legacy of the Etruscans and Abraham the Patriarch?

The Nobel Lecture Seamus Heaney received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1995 'for works of lyrical beauty and ethical depth, which exalt the every day miracles and the living past'. Crediting Poetry is the first publication of the lecture he delivered at the Swedish Academy on 7 December 1995.

Each of these chapters in this book of political counterfactuals describes a premiership that never happened, but might easily have done had the chips fallen slightly differently. The contributors, each of them experts in political history, have asked themselves questions like: what shape would the welfare state and the cold war have taken if the Prime Minister had been Herbert Morrison instead of Clement Attlee? What would have been consequences for Northern Ireland had Norman Tebbit succeeded Margaret Thatcher? How would our present life be different without New Labour - a name we would never have heard if either Kinnock or Smith had become Prime Minister and not Tony Blair? Each of the chapters in this book describes events that really might have happened. And almost did.

Chris Beckett grew up in 1960s Ethiopia, a country he describes as a 'barefoot empire, home of black-maned lions… old priests decked out like butterflies and blazing young singers of Ethio-jazz'. Ethiopia Boy plunges the reader into praise poems that sing and boast and glory in the colours and textures of this extraordinary country. Here is a world of feasting on spicy kikwot and of famine sucking the water from rivers, of lion buses and a prayer child, where Earth sings greetings to the feet that walk on her. Haunted by the memory of his friend Abebe, the cook's son, Beckett celebrates and laments a lost boyhood in poems of vivid immediacy.

Evas teaching career is seriously, and humorously, on the rocks. She loves her job, but is finding it harder by the minute to take her employer seriously. More and more Eva takes refuge in her mothers home city of Prague. She finds its cultural roots go back further than she could ever have imagined. As she shambles and laughs her way through school, Eva delves into the inspiring history of the city she loves. She is transformed by what she discovers. But will she find the links between Prague, North Yorkshire, the legacy of the Etruscans and Abraham the Patriarch?

This title comes with an introduction by Craig Raine. Three short novels show Golding at his playful, ironic and mysterious best. In The Scorpion God we see the world of ancient Egypt at the time of the earliest pharaohs. Clonk Clonk is a graphic account of a crippled youth's triumph over his tormentors in a primitive matriarchal society. And Envoy Extraordinary is a tale of Imperial Rome where the emperor loves his illegitimate grandson more than his own arrogant, loutish heir. "The writing is brilliant, so fluent and stylish that the stories read themselves like a dream. "(Daily Telegraph). "As ambitious and as engrossing as the best of Golding. "(Financial Times).

This volume contains a selection of early works by Harold Pinter. In the title play, everything in Flora's garden is lovely, and would be for Edward too, if it were not for the slight ache in his eyes and the mysterious matchseller at the gate. This edition also includes A Night Out, The Dwarfs and several revue sketches.

'The work of our best living playwright in its command of the language and its power to erect a coherent structure in a twilight zone of confusion and dismay.' The TimesDo Hirst and Spooner really know each other, or are they performing an elaborate charade? The ambiguity - and the comedy - intensify with the arrival of Briggs and Foster. All four inhabit a no-man's-land between time present and a time remembered, between reality and wkkk.net Man's Land was first presented at the National Theatre at the Old Vic, London, in 1975, revived at the Almeida Theatre, London, with Harold Pinter as Hirst and revived by the National Theatre, directed by Harold Pinter, in 2001.

Murder in the Cathedral, written for the Canterbury Festival on 1935, was the first high point on T. S. Eliot's dramatic achievement. It remains one of the great plays of the century. Like Greek drama, its theme and form are rooted in religion and ritual purgation and renewal, and it was this return to the earliest sources of drama that brought poetry triumphantly back to the English stage.

Stanley Webber is visited in his boarding house by strangers, Goldberg and McCann. An innocent-seeming birthday party for Stanley turns into a nightmare. The Birthday Party was first performed in 1958 and is now a modern classic, produced and studied throughout the world.

Happy Days was written in 1960 and first produced in London at the Royal Court Theatre in November 1962. WINNIE: […] Well anyway - this man Shower - or Cooker - no matter - and the woman - hand in hand - in the other hands bags - kind of big brown grips - standing there gaping at me […] - What's she doing? he says - What's the idea? he says - stuck up to her diddies in the bleeding ground - coarse fellow - What does it mean? he says - What's it meant to mean? - and so on - lot more stuff like that - usual drivel - Do you hear me? He says - I do, she says, God help me - What do you mean, he says, God help you? (stops filing nails, raises head, gazes front.) And you, she says, what's the idea of you, she says, what are you meant to mean?

Commissioned to mark the centenary of the Abbey Theatre in Dublin in 2004, The Burial at Thebes is Seamus Heaney's new verse translation of Sophocles' great tragedy, Antigone - whose eponymous heroine is one of the most sharply individualized and compelling figures in Western drama. Faithful to the 'local row' and to the fierce specificity of the play's time and place, The Burial at Thebes honours the separate and irreconcilable claims of its opposed voices, as they enact the ancient but perennial conflict between family and state in a time of crisis, pitching the morality of private allegiance against that of public service. Above all, The Burial at Thebes honours the sovereign urgency and grandeur of the Antigone, in which language speaks truth to power, then and now.

"e;The White Castle"e;, Orhan Pamuk's celebrated first novel, is the tale of a young Italian scholar captured by pirates and put up for auction at the Istanbul slave market. Acquired by a brilliant Turkish inventor, he is set to work on projects to entertain the jaded Sultan.

In the late 1590s, the Sultan secretly commissions a great book: a celebration of his life and his empire, to be illuminated by the best artists of the day - in the European manner. At a time of violent fundamentalism, however, this is a dangerous proposition. Even the illustrious circle of artists are not allowed to know for whom they are working. But when one of the miniaturists is murdered, their Master has to seek outside help. Did the dead painter fall victim to professional rivalry, romantic jealousy or religious terror?With the Sultan demanding an answer within three days, perhaps the clue lies somewhere in the half-finished pictures … Orhan Pamuk is one of the world's leading contemporary novelists and in My Name is Red, he fashioned an unforgettable tale of suspense, and an artful meditation on love and deception.

A frightening and impressive portrait of evil by one of Latin America's leading contemporary novelists. 'A monumentally engrossing novel.' Los Angeles Times

Dean Jocelin has a vision: that God has chosen him to erect a great spire on his cathedral. His mason anxiously advises against it, for the old cathedral was built without foundations. Nevertheless, the spire rises octagon upon octagon, pinnacle by pinnacle, until the stone pillars shriek and the ground beneath it swims. Its shadow falls ever darker on the world below, and on Dean Jocelin in wkkk.net the author of Lord of the Flies, The Spire is a dark and powerful portrait of one man's will, and the folly that he creates.'A superb tragedy … the book should become a classic.' Sunday Telegraph'A marvel.' Frank Kermode, New York Review of Books.

An aged prophetess at Delphi, the most sacred oracle in ancient Greece, looks back over her strange life as the Pythia, the First Lady and voice of the god Apollo. As a young virgin with disturbing psychic powers, Arieka was handed over to the service of the shrine by her parents. She has now spent sixty years as the very medium, the torn mouthpiece, of equivocal mantic utterances from the bronze tripod in the sanctuary beneath the temple. Over a lifetime at the mercy of god and priest and people she has watched the decay of Delphi's fortunes and its influence in the world. Her reflections on the mysteries of the oracle, which her own weird gifts have embodied, are matched by her feminine insight into the human frailties of the High Priest himself, a true Athenian, whose intriguing against the Romans brings about humiliation and disaster. This extraordinary short novel was left in draft at Golding's sudden death in 1993 but it is a psychological and historical triumph.

Darkness Visible opens at the height of the London Blitz, when a naked child steps out of an all-consuming fire. Miraculously saved but hideously scarred, soon tormented at school and at work, Matty becomes a wanderer, a seeker after some unknown redemption. Two more lost children await him, twins as exquisite as they are loveless. Toni dabbles in political violence; Sophy, in sexual tyranny. As Golding weaves their destinies together, his book reveals both the inner and outer darkness of our world. "An intensity of vision without parallel." (TLS). "A vision of elemental reality so vivid we seem to hallucinate the scenes…Magic." (New York Times Book Review).

His first published work of fiction (1934), More Pricks Than Kicks is a set of ten interlocked stories, set in Dublin and involving their adrift hero Belacqua in a series of encounters, as woman after woman comes crashing through his solipsism. More Pricks contains in embryo the centrifugal world of Beckett's men and women. She lifted the lobster clear of the table. It had about thirty seconds to live. Well, thought Belacqua, it's a quick death, God help us all. It is not.

The Unnamable - so named because he knows not who he may be - is from a nameless place. He speaks of previous selves ('all these Murphys, Molloys, and Malones…') as diversions from the need to stop speaking altogether. But, as with the other novels in the trilogy, the prose is full of marvellous precisions, full of its own reasons for keeping going. …perhaps the words have carried me to the threshold of my story, before the door that opens on my story, that would surprise me, if it opens, it will be I, will be the silence, where I am, I don't know, I'll never know, in the silence you don't know, you must go on, I can't go on, I'll go on.

Published in French in 1961, and in English in 1964, How It Is is a novel in three parts, written in short paragraphs, which tell (abruptly, cajolingly, bleakly) of a narrator lying in the dark, in the mud, repeating his life as he hears it uttered - or remembered - by another voice. Told from within, from the dark, the story is tirelessly and intimately explicit about the feelings that pervade his world, but fragmentary and vague about all else therein or beyond. Together with Molloy, How It Is counts for many readers as Beckett's greatest accomplishment in the novel form. It is also his most challenging narrative, both stylistically and for the pessimism of its vision, which continues the themes of reduced circumstance, of another life before the present, and the self-appraising search for an essential self, which were inaugurated in the great prose narratives of his earlier trilogy.

This is a first-hand journal about the Goldings' travels through Egypt, soon after winning the Nobel Prize, living on a motor cruiser on the Nile. Nothing went quite as planned, but William Golding's vivid and honest account of what actually happened, and of what he saw and felt about ancient Egypt and the exasperations of the living present, will delight his innumerable admirers and everyone who visits Egypt. "e;One of the funniest anti-travel books I have ever read"e;. (Daily Telegraph). "e;No previous book brings you so close to Golding the man. It bulges with abstruse knowledge ...and is often screamingly funny…Hugely enjoyable"e;. (The Times).

Widely and justly celebrated for his flawless handling of the lyric, Seamus Heaney is here shown venturing into new imaginative territory. Poems exploring the theme of loss, and in particular a sonnet sequence concerning the death of the poet's mother, are joined in The Haw Lantern by meditations on the conscience of the writer and exercises in an allegorical vein that will both surprise and delight the many admirers of his previous work. 'More than other poet since Wordsworth he can make us understand that the outside world is not outside, but what we are made of.' John Carey, Sunday Times

The title poem from this collection is set on an island that has been a site of pilgrimage in Ireland for over a thousand years. A narrative sequence, it is an autobiographical quest concerned with 'the growth of a poet's mind'. The long poem is preceded by a section of shorter lyrics and leads into a third group of poems in which the poet's voice is at one with the voice of the legendary mad King Sweeney. 'Surpasses even what one might reasonably expect from this magnificently gifted poet.' John Carey, Sunday Times

At the centre of this collection, which includes groups of elegies and love poems, there is a short sonnet sequence which concentrates themes apparent elsewhere in the book: the individual's responsibility for his own choices, the artist's commitment to his vocation, the vulnerability of all in the face of circumstance and death. 'Throughout the volume Heaney's outstanding gifts, his eye, his ear, his understanding of the poetic language are on display - this is a book we cannot do without.' Martin Dodsworth, Guardian

Included in Prufrock and Other Observations are the following poems: The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock Portrait of a Lady Preludes Rhapsody on a Windy Night Morning at the Window The Boston Evening Transcript Aunt Helen Cousin Nancy Mr. Apollinax Hysteria Conversation Galante La Figlia Che Piange

This volume contains a selection of work from each of Seamus Heaney's published books of poetry up to and including the Whitbread prize-winning collection, "e;The Haw Lantern"e; (1987). 'His is 'close-up' poetry - close up to thought, to the world, to the emotions. Few writers at work today, in verse or fiction, can give the sense of rich, fecund, lived life that Heaney does' - John Banville. 'More than any other poet since Wordsworth he can make us understand that the outside world is not outside, but what we are made of' - John Carey.

This title comes with an introduction by John Mullen. Dean Jocelin has a vision: that God has chosen him to erect a great spire on his cathedral. His mason anxiously advises against it, for the old cathedral was built without foundations. Nevertheless, the spire rises octagon upon octagon, pinnacle by pinnacle, until the stone pillars shriek and the ground beneath it swims. Its shadow falls ever darker on the world below, and on Dean Jocelin in particular. From the author of Lord of the Flies, The Spire is a dark and powerful portrait of one man's will, and the folly that he creates. "e;Quite simply, a marvel"e;. (Frank Kermode, New York Review of Books). "e;Superb…The book should become a classic"e;. (Sunday Telegraph). "e;An engrossing story"e;. (New York Times Book Review).

'An exultant night - a man in total command of his talent.' Observer'The most intense expression of compressed violence to be found anywhere in Pinter's plays.' The TimesWhen Teddy, a professor in an American university, brings his wife Ruth to visit his old home in London, he finds his family still living in the house. In the conflict that follows, it is Ruth who becomes the focus of the family's struggle for supremacy.

The Confidential Clerk was first produced at the Edinburgh Festival in the summer of 1953.'The dialogue of The Confidential Clerk has a precision and a lightly felt rhythm unmatched in the writing of any contemporary dramatist.' Times Literary Supplement'A triumph of dramatic skill: the handling of the two levels of the play is masterly and Eliot's verse registers its greatest achievement on the stage-passages of great lyrical beauty are incorporated into the dialogue.'

With an introduction by Meg Rosoff William Golding's final novel, left in draft at his death, tells the story of a priestess of Apollo. Arieka is one of the last to prophesy at Delphi, in the shadowy years when the Romans were securing their grip on the tribes and cities of Greece. The plain, unloved daughter of a local grandee, she is rescued from the contempt and neglect of her family by her Delphic role. Her ambiguous attitude to the god and her belief in him seem to move in parallel with the decline of the god himself - but things are more complicated than they appear. "A remarkable work...A compelling storyteller as well as a clear-eyed philosopher of the dangerous puzzles of being human." (The Times). "A wonderful central character. The story stretches out as clean and dry and clear as the beach in Lord of the Flies."(Independent). "Feline, deadpan and at moments hilarious." (Observer).

The first volume of William Golding's Sea Trilogy. Sailing to Australia in the early years of the nineteenth century, Edmund Talbot keeps a journal to amuse his godfather back in England. Full of wit and disdain, he records the mounting tensions on the ancient, sinking warship where officers, sailors, soldiers and emigrants jostle in the cramped spaces below decks. Then a single passenger, the obsequious Reverend Colley, attracts the animosity of the sailors, and in the seclusion of the fo'castle something happens to bring him into a 'hell of degradation', where shame is a force deadlier than the sea itself. "e;The work of a master at the full stretch of his age and wisdom - necessary, provoking, urgent, rich, complex and rare"e;. (The Times). "e;An extraordinary novel"e;. (Observer). "e;Golding's best and most accessible story since Lord of the Flies"e;. (Melvyn Bragg).

Edited by J. C. C. Mays Murphy, Samuel Beckett's first novel, was published in 1938. Its work-shy eponymous hero, adrift in London, realises that desire can never be satisfied and withdraws from life, in search of stupor. Murphy's lovestruck fiance Celia tries with tragic pathos to draw him back, but her attempts are doomed to failure. Murphy's friends and familiars are simulacra of Murphy, fragmented and incomplete. But Beckett's achievement lies in the brilliantly original language used to communicate this vision of isolation and misunderstanding. The combination of particularity and absurdity gives Murphy's world its painful definition, but the sheer comic energy of Beckett's prose releases characters and readers alike into exuberance.

These lovable cat poems were written by T. S. Eliot for his godchildren and friends in the 1930s. They have delighted generations of children since, and inspired Andrew Lloyd Webber's brilliant musical "e;Cats"e;. This edition includes illustrations by Nicolas Bentley.

"The Black Book"is Orhan Pamuk's tour de force, a stunning tapestry of Middle Eastern and Islamic culture which confirmed his reputation as a writer of international stature. Richly atmospheric and Rabelaisian in scope, it is a labyrinthine novel suffused with the sights, sounds and scents of Istanbul, an unforgettable evocation of the city where East meets West, and a boldly unconventional mystery that plumbs the elusive nature of identity, fiction, interpretation and reality.

'I read a book one day, and my whole life was changed'. So begins "e;The New Life"e;, Orhan Pamuk's fabulous road novel about a young student who yearns for the life promised by a dangerously magical book. He falls in love, abandons his studies, turns his back on home and family, and embarks on restless bus trips through the provinces, in pursuit of an elusive vision. This is a wondrous odyssey, laying bare the rage of an arid heartland. In coffee houses with black-and-white TV sets, on buses where passengers ride watching B-movies on flickering screens, in wrecks along the highway, in paranoid fictions with spies as punctual as watches, the magic of Pamuk's creation comes alive.

A visitor from Peru, happening upon an exhibition of photographs from the Amazon jungle in an obscure Florentine picture gallery, finds his attention drawn to a picture of a tribal storyteller seated among a circle of Michiguenga Indians. There is something odd about the storyteller. He is too light-skinned to be an Indian. As the visitor stares at the photograph, it dawns on him that he knows this man. The storyteller is his long-lost friend, Saul Zuratas, his classmate from university who was thought to have disappeared in Israel. The Storyteller is a brilliant and compelling study of the world of the primitive and its place in our own modern lives.

The War of the End of the World is one of the great modern historical novels. Inspired by a real episode in Brazilian history, Mario Vargas Llosa tells the story of an apocalyptic movement, led by a mysterious prophet, in which prostitutes, beggars and bandits establish Canudos, a new republic, a libertarian paradise.

Ricardo Somocurcio is in love with a bad girl. He loves her as a teenager known as 'Lily' in Lima in 1950, where she claims to be from Chile but vanishes the moment her claim is exposed as fiction. He loves her next in Paris as 'Comrade Arlette', an activist en route to Cuba, an icy, remote lover who denies knowing anything about the Lily of years gone by. Whoever the bad girl turns up as and however poorly she treats him, Ricardo is doomed to worship her. Gifted liar and irresistible, maddening muse-does Ricardo ever know who she really is?

This is a one-volume edition of this classic sequence of sea novels set in the early nineteenth century, about a voyage from England to Australia. Rites of Passage (Winner of the Booker Prize) "e;The work of a master at the full stretch of his age and wisdom."e; (The Times Close Quarters). "e;A feat of imaginative reconstruction, as vivid as a dream."e; (Daily Mail Fire Down Below). "e;Laden to the waterline with a rich cargo of practicalities and poetry, pain and hilarity, drama and exaltation."e; (Sunday Times).

'Malone', writes Malone, 'is what I am called now.' On his deathbed, and wiling away the time with stories, the octogenarian Malone's account of his condition is intermittent and contradictory, shifting with the vagaries of the passing days: without mellowness, without elegiacs; wittier, jauntier, and capable of wilder rages than Molloy. The sound I liked best had nothing noble about it. It was the barking of the dogs, at night, in the clusters of hovels up in the hills, where the stone-cutters lived, like generations of stone-cutters before them. it came down to me where I lay, in the house in the plain, wild and soft, at the limit of earshot, soon weary. The dogs of the valley replied with their gross bay all fangs and jaws and foam…

This is an important and illuminating collection of essays and lectures by the winner of the 1983 Nobel Prize for Literature. William Golding writes about places as diverse as Wiltshire, where he lived for over half a century, Dutch waterways, Delphi, Egypt ancient and modern, and planet Earth herself. Other essays discuss books and ideas, and provide a fascinating background to the appreciate Golding's own writing and imagination. It includes Golding's Nobel Speech. "e;Golding come through this collection as reserved and wary, but delightful...His writing is a joy"e;. (Sunday Times).

This volume is a much-needed new selection of Seamus Heaney's work, taking account of recent volumes and of the author's work as a translator, and offering a more generous choice from previous volumes. Opened Ground: Poems 1966-1996 comes as close to being a 'Collected Poems' as its author cares to make it. It replaces his New Selected Poems 1966-1987, giving a fuller selection from each of the volumes represented there and adding large parts of those that have appeared since, together with examples of his work as a translator from the Greek, Latin, Italian and other languages. The book concludes with 'Crediting Poetry', the speech with which Seamus Heaney accepted the 1995 Nobel Prize in Literature, awarded to him, in the words of the Swedish Academy of Letters, for his 'works of lyrical beauty and ethical depth'.

This collection of Seamus Heaney's work, especially in the vivid and surprising twelve-line poems entitled "e;Squarings"e;, shows he is ready to re-imagine experience and "e;to credit marvels"e;. The title poem, "e;Seeing Things"e;, is typical of the whole book. It begins with memories of an actual event, then moves towards the visionary while never relinquishing its feel for the textures and sensations of the world. Translations of Virgil and Homer provide a prelude and a coda where motifs implicit in the earlier lyrics are given direct expression in extended narratives. Journeys to underworlds and otherworlds correspond to the journeys made by poetic language itself. From the author of "e;The Haw Lantern"e;, "e;Wintering Out"e;, "e;Station Island"e; and "e;North"e;.

In North Seamus Heaney found a myth which allowed him to articulate a vision of Ireland - its people, history and landscape. Here the Irish experience is refracted through images drawn from different parts of the Northern European experience, and the idea of the north allows the poet to contemplate the violence on his home ground in relation to memories of the Scandinavian and English invasions which have marked Irish history so indelibly.

It was as a poet that Samuel Beckett launched himself in the little reviews of 1930s Paris, and as a poet that he ended his career. This new selection, from Whoroscope (1930) to 'what is the word' (1988), describes a lifetime's arc of writing. It was as a poet moreover that Beckett made his first breakthrough into writing in French, and the Selected Poems represents work in both languages, including the sequence of brief but highly crafted mirlitonnades, which did so much to usher in the style of his late prose, and come as close as anything he wrote to honouring the ambition to 'bore one hole after another in language, until what lurks behind it - be it something or nothing - begins to seep through.' Also included are several of Beckett's translations from contemporaries - Apollinaire, Eluard, Michaux, Montale - in versions which count among his own poetic achievements. It is edited by David Wheatley.

Four Quartets is the culminating achievement of T.S. Eliot's career as a poet. While containing some of the most musical and unforgettable passages in twentieth-century poetry, its four parts, 'Burnt Norton', 'East Coker', 'The Dry Salvages' and 'Little Gidding', present a rigorous meditation on the spiritual, philosophical and personal themes which preoccupied the author. It was the way in which a private voice was heard to speak for the concerns of an entire generation, in the midst of war and doubt, that confirmed it as an enduring masterpiece.

'Between my finger and my thumb/ The squat pen rests; snug as a gun' - from "e;Digging"e;. With its lyrical and descriptive powers, "e;Death of a Naturalist"e; marked the auspicious debut of one of the century's finest poets.

With an introduction by Andrew Martin Fame, success, fortune, a drink problem slipping over the edge into alcoholism, a dead marriage, the incurable itches of middle-aged lust. For Wilfred Barclay, novelist, the final unbearable irritation is Professor Rick L. Tucker, implacable in his determination to become The Barclay Man. Locked in a lethal relationship they stumble across Europe, shedding wives, self-respect and illusions. The climax of their odyssey, when it comes, is as inevitable as it is unexpected. "e;Rich as a compost heap...It moves you and at times it can shake you"e;. (Melvyn Bragg). "e;A complex literary comedy from an extraordinarily powerful writer, which holds us right through to the end"e;. (Malcolm Bradbury).

The Hothouse was first produced in 1980, though Harold Pinter wrote the play in 1958 just before commencing work on The Caretaker.'The Hothouse is one of Pinter's best plays: one that deals with the worm-eaten corruption of bureaucracy, the secrecy of government and the disjunction between language and experience.'Michael Billington.'The Hothouse is at once sinister and hilarious, suggesting an unholy alliance between Kafka and Fedyeau.'The National Theatre presented a major revival of The Hothouse in July 2007.'The foremost representative of British drama in the second half of the twentieth century.'Swedish Academy citation on awarding Harold Pinter the Nobel Prize for Literature, 2005

Harold Pinter can sketch a world in a few lines which reveal the power of his vision focussed on the horrors that have been and that are to come.

Old Times was first presented by the Royal Shakespeare Company at the Aldwych Theatre, London, on 1 June 1971. It was revived at the Donmar Warehouse, London, in July 2004.'Old Times is a joyous, wonderful play that people will talk about as long as we have a theatre.' New York Times' What am I writing about? Not the weasel under the cocktail cabinet … I can sum up none of my plays. I can describe none of them, except to say: that is what happened. This is what they said. That is what they did.' Harold Pinter

The second volume of Harold Pinter's collected work includes The wkkk.net CaretakerIt was with this play that Harold Pinter had his first major success. The obsessive caretaker, Davies, is a classic comic creation, and his uneasy relationship with the enigmatic Aston and Mick a landmark in twentieth-century drama.'The play remains a masterpiece.' Daily Telegraph The Collection This one-act play for television explores the sexual manoeuvres between two couples in the clothing trade. 'Taps the adrenal flow of contemporary guilt and anxiety.' Time The Lover Richard and Sarah conduct themselves with apparent respectability in the mornings, whilst living out a sequence of erotic rituals in the afternoons. 'Beautifully written... the sexiest play I remember seeing on the television.' Sunday Times The volume also includes Night School and The Dwarfs, plus five revue sketches written during the same period.

Eliot's haunting verse play, set in a country house in the north of England, was performed at the Westminster Theatre in London in March 1939, six months before the outbreak of war.'What is wonderful is the marvellous opening out of consciousness, the flowering of meaning, which makes the play an account of a spiritual experience. There are passages of great poetic beauty, and statements which are the fruits of a lifetime devoted to poetry.' Listener

T. S. Eliot's last play, drafted originally in 1955 but not completed until three years later. Lord Claverton, an eminent former cabinet minister and banker, is helped to confront his past by the love of his daughter, his wkkk.net dialogue in The Elder Statesman, the love scenes in particular, contain some of Eliot's most tender and expressive writing for the theatre. The play was first performed at the Edinburgh Festival in 1958.

A restaurant. Two curved banquettes. It's a celebration. Violent, wildly funny, Harold Pinter's new play displays a vivid zest for wkkk.net The Room, Harold Pinter's first play, he reveals himself as already in full control of his unique ability to make dramatic poetry of the banalities of everyday speech and the precision with which it defines wkkk.net Pinter's latest play, Celebration, and his first play, The Room directed by the author himself, premired as a double-bill at London's Almeida Theatre in March 2000.

It was with this play that Harold Pinter had his first major success, and its production history since it was first performed in 1960 has established the work as a landmark in twentieth-century drama. The obsessive caretaker, Davies, whose papers are in Sidcup, is a classic comic creation, and his uneasy relationship with the enigmatic Aston and Mick established the author's individuality with an international audience.

Mario Vargas Llosa's A Fish in the Water is a twofold book: a memoir by one of Latin America's most celebrated writers, beginning with his birth in 1936 in Arequipa, Peru; and the story of his organization of the reform movement which culminated in his bid for the Peruvian presidency in 1990. Llosa evokes the experiences which gave rise to his fiction, and describes the social, literary, and political influences that led him to enter the political arena as a crusader for a free-market economy. A deeply absorbing look at how fact becomes fiction and at the formation of a courageous writer with strong political commitments, A Fish in the Water reveals Mario Vargas Llosa as a world figure whose real story is just beginning.

Originally written in French and translated into English by Beckett, Endgame was given its first London performance at the Royal Court Theatre in 1957. HAMM: Clov! CLOV: Yes. HAMM: Nature has forgotten us. CLOV: There's no more nature. HAMM: No more nature! You exaggerate. CLOV: In the vicinity. HAMM: But we breathe, we change! We lose our hair our teeth! Our bloom! Our ideals! CLOV: Then she hasn't forgotten us.

The Museum of Innocence-set in Istanbul between 1975 and today-tells the story of Kemal, the son of one of Istanbul's richest families, and of his obsessive love for a poor and distant relation, the beautiful Fusun, who is a shop-girl in a small wkkk.net novel depicts a panoramic view of life in Istanbul as it chronicles this long, obsessive, love affair between Kemal and Fusun; and Pamuk beautifully captures the identity crisis esperienced by Istanbul's upper classes who find themselves caught between traditional and westernised ways of wkkk.net the past ten years, Pamuk has been setting up a museum in the house in which his hero's fictional family lived, to display Kemal's strange collection of objects associated with Fusun and their relationship. The museum will be called The Museum of Innocence and it opens in 2010.

'A comic novel on the grand scale written with tremendous confidence and verve. Mario, 18-year-old law student and radio news-editor, falls scandalously for his Aunt Julia, the 32-year-old divorced wife of a cousin, and the progressively lunatic story of this affair is interwoven with episodes from a series of radio soap-operas written by his friend Pedro Comacho. Vargas Llosa's huge energy and inventiveness is extravagant and fabulously funny.'

The Cubs and Other Stories is Mario Vargas Llosa's only volume of short fiction available in English. Vargas Llosa's domain is the Peru of male youth and machismo, where life's dramas play themselves out on the soccer field, on the dance floor and on street corners. The title work, The Cubs, tells the story of the carefree boyhood of PP Cuellar and his friends, and of PP's bizarre accident and tragic coming of age. In a candid and perceptive foreword to this collection of early writing, Vargas Llosa provides background to the volume and a unique glimpse into the mind of the artist.

"e;Powerful and provocative …Each time I revisit "e;The Inheritors"e; I find something new."e; (Penelope Lively). This was a different voice; not the voice of the people. It was the voice of other. When the spring came the people moved back to their familiar home. But this year strange things were happening - inexplicable sounds and smells; unexpected acts of violence; and new, unimaginable creatures half-glimpsed through the leaves. Seen through the eyes of a small tribe of Neanderthals whose world is hanging in the balance, "e;The Inheritors"e; explores the emergence of a new race - ourselves, Homo sapiens - whose growing dominance threatens an entire way of life. "e;An earthquake in the petrified forest of the English novel."e; (Arthur Koestler). It comes with a new introduction by John Carey.

Molloy is Samuel Beckett's best-known novel, and his first published work to be written in French, ushering in a period of concentrated creativity in the late 1940s which included the companion novels Malone Dies and The Unnamable. The narrative of Molloy, old and ill, remembering and forgetting, scarcely human, begets a parallel tale of the spinsterish Moran, a private detective sent in search of him, whose own deterioration during the quest joins in with the catalogue of Molloy's woes. Molloy brings a world into existence with finicking certainties, at the tip of whoever is holding the pencil, and trades larger uncertainties with the reader. Then I went back into the house and wrote, It is midnight. The rain is beating on the windows. It was not midnight. It was not raining.

This is a dazzling collection of occasional writings by the Nobel Prize-winning novelist on subjects ranging from Thermopylae to the English Channel, and from Coral Island to Jules Verne. "e;A book of occasional essays which afford us many fascinating insights into Golding the man…It is highly individual yet profoundly modest; it has an unusual, slightly angular candour, full of painful knowledge and a beautiful humanity …event the slightest piece bears the mark of his rare, austere mind, his remarkable imagination…Even these occasional essays are enough to remind us that …there is not, at the moment, a writer to touch him"e;. (New Society).

Sweeney Astray is Seamus Heaney's version of the medieval Irish work Buile Suibhne - the first complete translation since 1913. Its hero, Mad Sweeney, undergoes a series of purgatorial adventures after he is cursed by a saint and turned into a bird at the Battle of Moira. The poetry spoken by the mad king, exiled to the trees and the slopes, is among the richest and most immediately appealing in the whole canon of Gaelic literature. Sweeney Astray not only restores to us a work of historical and literary importance but offers the genius of one of our greatest living poets to reinforce its claims on the reader of contemporary literature.

'Seamus Heaney has gone beyond the themes of his earlier poetry and has made the giant step towards the most ambitious, most intractable themes of maturity. The power of this book comes from a sense that he is reaching out towards a type of desolation and of isolation without which no imagination can be seen to have grown up.' Eavan Boland, Irish Times 'Keyed and pitched unlike any other significant poet at work in the language anywhere.' Harold Bloom, Times Literary Supplement

Originally published in 1969, Seamus Heaney's Door into the Dark continues a furrow so startlingly opened in his first collection, Death of a Naturalist (1966). With the sensuosness and physicality of language that would become the hallmark of his early writing, these poems graphically depict the author's rural upbringing, from the local forge to the banks of Lough Neagh, concluding in the preserving waters of the bogland and a look ahead to his next book, Wintering Out (1972).

'Each year Eliot's presence reasserts itself at a deeper level, to an audience that is surprised to find itself more chastened, more astonished, more humble.' Ted Hughes Poet, dramatist, critic and editor, T. S. Eliot was one of the defining figures of twentieth-century poetry. This edition of Collected Poems 1909-1962 includes his verse from Prufrock and Other Observations (1917) to Four Quartets (1943), and includes such literary landmarks as The Waste Land and Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats.

'An irresistibly coherent book which celebrates the rising and the raising of the human spirit' - Michael Hofmann, "e;The Times"e;. 'If any poetry written today can have this 'redemptive effect' - as Heaney in his critical writing has begun to claim it can - then this is it' - Mick Imlah, "e;Independent on Sunday"e;.