Series: Faber Stories

Mr Salary by Sally Rooney is a captivating novella that delves deep into the complexities of love, loss, and unspoken desires. The story follows Sukie, a young woman who once moved in with Nathan following the death of her mother and the challenging relationship with her father. Now, as they reunite years later, they find themselves at the precipice of...

The evening is fine. In the sky, a few early stars are shining of their own accord. She watches the dog licking the bowl clean. This dog will break her daughter's heart, she's sure of it. The Forester's Daughter by Claire Keegan takes us into the heart of the Wicklow countryside, exploring the life of the farming family of Victor...

Well, thought Belacqua, it's a quick death, God help us all.It is not. Dante and the Lobster is the first of the linked short stories in Samuel Beckett's first book, More Pricks Than Kicks. Published in 1934, its style was recognisably indebted to that of his mentor, James Joyce, and crammed with linguistic texture and allusion that Beckett later shed....

On the whole, it was easier than I had expected. Only once did I feel myself at risk. That was when the Inspector suddenly intervened. He said in a harsh voice: 'He married your wife, didn't he? Took her away from you some people might say. Nice piece of goods, too, by the look of her. Didn't you feel any...

When Ray turns up to visit his old university friends Charlie and Emily, he's given a special task: to be so much his useless self that he makes Charlie look good by comparison. But Ray has his own buried feelings to contend with. Decades earlier, he and Emily would listen to jazz when they were alone, and now, as Sarah...

You try every trick in the book to keep her. You write her letters. You drive her to work. You quote Neruda [...] You try it all, but one day she will simply sit up in bed and say, No more. In Yunior, a Dominican-American writer and Harvard professor, Junot Diaz has created an irresistibly erratic protagonist, who sweeps you...

A chance encounter leads a man to spend the afternoon with an older woman, now a widow, who escaped him fifteen years earlier. Neither of them doubts that the day will end in disgust, but for one intimate moment each finds a way to overcome mortality. Let the Old Dead Make Room for the Young Dead, written in 1969 before...

An unnamed protagonist is on holiday with her new, much-married lover, in the company of the monstrously rich. How long would she last? It would be uppermost in all their minds. Each day, while the others are out at sea, she is taught to swim. Eventually, she will be expected to perform. The pressure mounts; it is only a matter...

Thinking Betty was in the bath Graham was watching a late-night programme on Channel 4 called 'Footballers with Their Shirts Off' when she unexpectedly came in on the trail of the hairdryer. 'I didn't know you were interested in football,' said Betty. No one must ever find out that Graham is 'not the marrying sort'. Certainly not his wife, or...

Adrienne is living in a puritanical age, when the best compliment a childless woman can get is: You'd make a terrific mother. That's when she goes to her friends' Labour Day picnic and accidentally kills their baby. The shock of this scene is expertly packed into two brief paragraphs. What follows is Adrienne's retreat from life and her attempt to...

"My only concern," John McGahern once said, "is that I get the sentence right and describe my world clearly and deeply." The Country Funeral witnesses three brothers, John, Philly, and Fonsie Ryan, as they travel west from Dublin to Gloria Bog—the heart of the territory where so many of McGahern's stories take place—to attend the funeral of their uncle. Depicting...

Lips the colour of blood, the sun an unprecedented orange, train wheels that sound like 'guilt, and guilt, and guilt': these are just some of the things Mary Ventura begins to notice on her journey to the ninth kingdom. But what is the ninth kingdom? she asks a kind-seeming lady in her carriage. It is the kingdom of the frozen...

A family sets out on a road trip in the American South. The grandmother suggests they change course in order to avoid 'The Misfit', an escaped convict who's reportedly heading towards Florida. But when their car turns over in a ditch, who should they flag down for help but the very man whose picture they recognise from the paper... A...

You have to marry outside your clan, she said. That's law. All the people we knew were Bird Clan. All the others were gone. When Gloria's great-grandmother, Green Leaf, left her home in the Hiwassee Valley of Tennessee, it was with a man on a stolen horse. She was one of the fugitive bands of Cherokee who'd resisted capture long...

Of course, of everybody of whom this particular hero was suspicious, he was most suspicious of femme fatale, of this woman he was in love with. Even before he discovered she had a spell on her he was distrustful of her. He didn't want to be, but that's just how it goes. Mostly Hero, written by Anna Burns before she...

This heart is sore and sad. Crossed in love? The manuscript of Giacomo Joyce, written in James Joyce's best handwriting and folded between the covers of a school notebook, was discovered in Trieste. Most likely written in 1914, some of it served as a rehearsal for passages in Ulysses. Had Joyce meant to pillage it or publish it? Either way,...

Between his second and third tours of duty, a soldier returns home. To his former home, that is, using an old key while the new tenant is at work. Is he re-entering his old life or borrowing someone else's? Where is the line he will not cross? Each day is the same: he exists in a state of suspension, barely...

In his masterful story A River in Egypt, David Means paints a portrait of a moment. Cavanaugh and his young son are suspended; trapped in what a nurse calls "the sweat chamber", where the boy will be tested for cystic fibrosis. Cavanaugh has brought distractions – spasmodic action figures, malformed toy trucks – but they do little to alter the...

As he stood up, he suddenly felt aroused by Mrs Shaw's large breasts, boy's haircut, and little-girl sneakers. Even her nostrils suggested a frank sexuality. Gopal wanted to put his hands on her waist and pull her toward him. And then he realized that he had. Gopal Maurya's wife has left him, preferring to seek enlightenment in an ashram in...

In perhaps the most magnificent of what he called his strange stories, Robert Aickman blurs the lines between memory, premonition, and the hallucinated life. Lene, a woman now recovering from the losses of the Second World War, recalls a gothic dolls' house of her childhood and the way in which its uncanny inhabitants entered her dreams. Most chillingly, the geometries...