Leon Trotsky was the charismatic intellectual of the Russian Revolution, an authoritarian organizer, who might have succeeded Lenin and become the ruler of the Soviet Union. But by the time the Second World War broke out he was in exile, living in Mexico in a villa borrowed from the great artists Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo, guarded only by several naive young American acolytes. The household was awash with emotional turmoil — tensions grew between Trotsky and Rivera, as questions arose over his relations with Frida Kahlo. His wife was restless and jealous. Outside of the villa, Mexican communists tried to storm the house, the Trotskys' sons were being persecuted and killed in Europe, and in Moscow, Stalin personally ordered his secret police to kill his fiercest left-wing critic — at any cost. By the summer of 1940, they had found a man who could penetrate the tight security around the house in far-away Mexico... Bertrand Patenaude's book reconstructs a famous state crime with chilling precision and a page-turning quality. It tells the amazing story of a deadly rivalry, revolutionary fanaticism and tragic violence and loss.

Baba Yaga is an old hag who lives in a house built on chicken legs and kidnaps small children. She is one of the most pervasive and powerful creatures in all mythology. But what does she have to do with a writer's journey to Bulgaria in 2007 on behalf of her mother? Or with a trio of old women who decide to spend a week together at a hotel spa?

In 1788 Daniel Rooke sets out on a journey that will change the course of his life. As a lieutenant in the First Fleet, he lands on the wild and unknown shores of New South Wales. There he sets up an observatory to chart the stars. But this country will prove far more revelatory than the stars above. Based on real events, The Lieutenant tells the unforgettable story of Rooke's connection with an Aboriginal child — a remarkable friendship that resonates across the oceans and the centuries.

Yes, Minister, and the equally successful sequel Yes, Prime Minister captured a niche in the political consciousness of the nation. First broadcast thirty years ago, the original writers of these classic series have reunited to create a bang up to date Yes, Prime Minister for the stage. Spin, blackberries, sexed-up dossiers, sleaze, global warming and a country on the brink of financial meltdown form the backdrop to mayhem at Chequers as the Foreign Minister of Kumranistan makes a seriously compromising offer of salvation. Prime Minister Jim Hacker remains in power with his coterie of close advisors including Cabinet Secretary Sir Humphrey Appleby and Principal Private Secretary Bernard Woolley, but for how long? They govern a whole new world. Yes, Prime Minister premiered in the Festival Theatre, Chichester, in May 2010.

Cats! Some are sane, some are mad and some are good and some are bad. You can meet magical Mr Mistoffelees, sleepy Old Deuteronomy and curious Rum Tum Tugger. But you'll be lucky to meet Macavity because Macavity's not there! In 1925 T.S. Eliot became co-director of Faber & Faber, who remain his publishers to this day. Throughout the 1930s he composed the now famous poems about Macavity, Old Deuteronomy, Mr Mistoffelees and many other cats, under the name of 'Old Possum'. In 1981 Eliot's poems were set to music by Andrew Lloyd Webber as Cats which went on to become the longest-running Broadway musical in history. This charming new edition contains original colour illustrations by the award-winning illustrator of The Gruffalo, Axel Scheffler.

In one of the most acclaimed and strange novels of recent years, Kazuo Ishiguro imagines the lives of a group of students growing up in a darkly skewered version of contemporary England. Narrated by Kathy, now 31, Never Let Me Go hauntingly dramatises her attempts to come to terms with her childhood at the seemingly idyllic Hailsham School, and with the fate that has always awaited her and her closest friends in the wider world. A story of love, friendship and memory, Never Let Me Go is charged throughout with a sense of the fragility of life.

Abby Lovitt has always been more at ease with horses than with people. Her father insists they call all the mares 'Jewel' and all the geldings 'George' and warns Abby not to get attached: the horses are there to be sold. But with all the stress at school (the Big Four have turned against Abby and her friends) and home (her brother Danny is gone — for good, it seems — and now Daddy won't speak his name), Abby seeks refuge with the Georges and the Jewels. But there's one gelding on her family's farm that gives her no end of trouble: the horse who won't meet her gaze, the horse who bucks her right off every chance he gets, the horse her father makes her ride and train, every day. She calls him the Ornery George.

Twentieth-century history has thrown up a few sinister characters stranger and more cruel than Baron Ungern-Sternberg, but not many, and only he conquered a country with a cavalry army — the last person in history to do so — in the in the age of the aeroplane and the tank. This violent, anti-Semitic fanatic took over Mongolia in 1919 with a ragtag force of White Russians, Siberians, Japanese and native Mongolians. He dreamed of creating a huge horse army with which he would retake Moscow and install a new despotic Tsar. Some saw him as a promised reincarnation of Genghis Khan who would restore the greatness of the Mongolian Empire. This is an epic story, which moves from the Baltic through the vastness of Russia to Siberia and the Mongolian steppe. Ungern was born into the German aristocracy, descendants of the Teutonic Knights, which ruled the Baltic region under the Tsars. Ejected from his regiment for violence and instability, he found himself when he was posted to the Russian Far East before the First World War. He had already found his way to the cocktail of mystical beliefs and esoteric knowledge that was common among people of his class. Now he found Mongolian Buddhism, a very different creed from the doctrine of peace and love we associate with followers of the Buddha. Its hells and vengefulness chimed with his already extreme hatred of Jews, liberals and Bolsheviks. The aftermath of the war, in which he fought with reckless bravery, saw Ungern in the Far East leading a wild bunch of counter-revolutionaries. James Palmer describes his spiral into ever darker obsessions, and evermore cruel treatment of enemies. This was Mr Kurtz on horseback, covered in amulets and animal skins, leading a straggling horde of desperate men. In the end, Trotsky, then in charge of the Red Army, sent a formidable force against them. James Palmer does full justice to this barely believable story of a man who foreshadowed the Nazis in his combination of mysticism and genocidal violence, and he explains Ungern’s strange religious beliefs and the culture of Mongolia, of which this adventurer became, for a brief period, the absolute ruler.

A Russian woman named Lara arrives in Afghanistan at the house of Marcus Caldwell, an Englishman and widower living in the shadow of the Tora Bora mountains. Marcus' daughter, Zameen, may have known Lara's brother, a Soviet soldier who disappeared in the area many years previously. But like Marcus' wife, Zameen is dead; a victim of the age in which she was born. In the days that follow, further people arrive at the house: two Americans who have spent much of their adult lives in the area; a young Afghan teacher; and a radicalized young man intent on his own path. And Nadeem Aslam paints a moving, beautiful and powerful portrait of a land and a people torn apart through love and war.

Meet the water bears that can live in suspension for hundreds of years, the parasite carried by your cat that makes men grumpy and women promiscuous, and the woodlouse that drinks through its bottom. Marvel at elephants that walk on tiptoe, the pigs that shine in the dark, and the woodpeckers that have ears on the end of their tongues. From the team that brought ignorance to millions, a Christmas bestseller — full of illuminating illustrations, maps and diagrams — shrunk down to a pocket-friendly, easily-searchable, portability-considerate size.

«The third book in Jason Goodwin's celebrated series takes Yashim from the winding alleyways of Istanbul to the decaying grandeur of Venice. Charged by the Sultan to find a stolen painting by Bellini, he enlists the help of his friend Palewski, the Polish Ambassador, and goes undercover. Venice in 1840 is a city of empty palazzos and silent canals, and Palewski starts to mingle with Venetian dealers — self-made men, faded aristocrats and the hedonistic Contessa. But when two bodies turn up in the canal, he realises that art in Venice is a deadly business. And meanwhile, what has happened to Yashim? «The Bellini Card» is a thrilling adventure in which a quest for a lost painting turns into dangerous game of cat and mouse that threatens to destroy the Ottoman throne and overturn the balance of power in Europe.»

August Brill, an elderly book critic, lies awake in the dark, unable to sleep. Elsewhere in the house are his daughter, Miriam, and granddaughter, Katya, each with her own reasons for lying awake and watchful in the long Vermont night...

These beautiful gift hardback editions are being published to celebrate Faber's 80th anniversary. Each volume contains the work of one major 20th century poet selected by another writer. The gorgeous covers have each been designed by a different printmaker who has focused on a key theme in the poet's work. The other poets in the collection are: Auden, Betjemen, Plath, Hughes and Yeats.

A parable about love, literature and fanaticism. A young university student becomes obsessed with a magical book that delves into the dangerous natures of love and self. Abandoning his studies and his family, he goes with the beautiful Janan on a search for the meaning of the book`s darker secrets.

Three children are massacred in their beds. The crushed corpse of their mother is discovered in a dockside warehouse. Then the husband, Bruno Gottewald, is dead and buried — killed while out on field manoeuvres. In less than a week, the entire Gottewald family has been wiped off the face of the earth. A tragic coincidence? Or are the invading French army using the massacre to expand their power? Hanno Stiffeniis, a Prussian magistrate, goes to investigate the deaths, seeking to discover how the crime was committed and the motive behind the massacre. But only Hanno's wife, Helena, knows what truly happened in that cottage in the woods...

Aurelio Zen is posted to Calabria, where in the heart of a tight-knit traditional community there has been a brutal murder. Zen is determined to find a way to penetrate the code of silence and uncover the truth. But his mission is complicated by another secret which has drawn strangers from the other side of the world — a hunt for buried treasure launched by a single-minded player with millions to spend pursuing his bizarre and deadly obsession.

«Che is raised in isolated privilege by his New York grandmother, precocious son of radical Harvard students in the sixties. Yearning for his famous outlaw parents, denied all access to television and the news, he takes hope from his long haired teenage neighbour who predicts they will come for you, man. They'll break you out of here. Soon Che too is an outlaw, fleeing down subways, abandoning seedy motels at night, as he is pitched into a journey that leads him to a hippy commune in the jungle of tropical Queensland. Here he slowly, bravely, confronts his life, learning that nothing is what it seems. «His Illegal Self» is an achingly beautiful and emotional story of the love between a young woman and a little boy, and a wonderful journey of self-discovery.»