Throughout April, we’re offering a special offer on a select range of award-winning and popular Faber titles – buy two books, and receive a third book for free. Find out more here.
Here are some suggestions for which three books to buy – based on what kind of book you’re looking for.
Smart fiction exploring family dynamics
Suggested bundle…
- Family Life by Akhil Sharma
- Bark by Lorrie Moore
- Swimming Home by Deborah Levy
Why…
These three novels all explore complex relationships between families. Deborah Levy’s Swimming Home is a tense, simmering tale about a family on holidays. Lorrie Moore’s Bark is a collection of sharp, funny stories about the public and private absurdities of American life. And, in the words of our reviewer, Akhil Sharma’s Family Life ‘presents a beautiful, unsentimental story of grief, made unerringly alive by the small, intimate moments of familial love’.
Plot-twisting crime reads
Suggested bundle…
- The Death of Lucy Kyte by Nicola Upson
- And When She Was Good by Laura Lippman
- Unnatural Causes by P.D. James
Why…
Here are three very different crime novels from three fantastic women authors. Laura Lippman’s And When She Was Good is a thriller about a suburban mother with a secret life. Nicola Upson’s atmospheric Josephine Tey series features a mystery writer living in 1930s London who often seems to find herself at the centre of real crimes. The Death of Lucy Kyte features our intrepid author inherits a a remote Suffolk cottage. And in P.D. James’ Unnatural Causes, investigator Adam Dalgliesh finds his well-earned holiday interrupted by a mutilated corpse (sigh).
Heartbreakers and tearjerkers
Suggested bundle…
- All My Puny Sorrows by Miriam Toews
- Lean on Pete by Willy Vlautin
- The Remains of the Day by Kazuo Ishiguro
Why…
This suggested bundle features deeply moving, character-driven novels that pack a powerful emotional punch. In Willy Vlautin’s novel, 15-year-old Charlie is left homeless under devastating circumstances but draws hope from his relationship with a failing racehorse named ‘Lean on Pete’. Kazuo Ishiguro’s Man Booker Prize-winning The Remains of the Day is a haunting evocation of the fallout of a life lived in service to a greater cause. And Miriam Toews has said she drew inspiration from her own sister’s suicide for her novel All My Puny Sorrows, which looks at the limits of love.
Books from prize winners
Suggested bundle…
- Housekeeping by Marilynne Robinson
- The White Castle by Orhan Pamuk (translated by Victoria Holbrook)
- Spies by Michael Frayn
Why…
Turkish writer Orhan Pamuk won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2006 for his body of work. Set in seventeenth-century Istanbul, The White Castle, sees a young Italian scholar taken prisoner by the Ottoman Empire. Michael Frayn’s psychological family drama Spies won the Whitbread Novel of the Year Award in 2002. And Marilynne Robinson’s astonishing debut novel Housekeeping won the PEN/Hemingway Award when it was published in 1980. (It was also nominated for the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction which Robinson would go on to win for her second novel, Gilead.)
Richly-detailed historical fiction
Suggested bundle…
- On Canaan’s Side by Sebastian Barry
- A Fine Balance by Rohinton Mistry
- Nightwood by Djuna Barnes
Why…
Travel back to three different times periods and countries with this selection. Rohinton Mistry’s A Fine Balance is set during the mid-1970s, when a ‘State of Emergency’ was declared in India. Djuna Barnes’s Nightwood unpacks the love lives of a group of Americans and Europeans living in Paris in the 1920s. And Sebastian Barry’s On Canaan’s Side spans nearly seven decades in Lilly Bere’s telling of her story, from the moment she was forced to flee Dublin at the end of WWI to her forging of a new life in America.
