The first short story really got my imagination going, it was about a homeless man, hinting at a past but not revealing it to you, later the homeless man finds out he and others are wearing t-shirts that contain information about their lives, yet this is told using symbols and he is unable to dec...
full review: http://wp.me/p42FJU-cPI've come to realize that Michel Faber is really ****ing weird, and I love it. My third Faber adventure, after The Crimson Petal and the White and The Fire Gospel is his collection of three novellas entitled The Courage Consort. I liked it much better than The F...
I was assuming I would like this more than four times as much as I like The Thirty-Nine Steps, which is a lot, but it didn’t turn out quite like that. It is a fairly topical read at the moment (January 2013) because Whitby, where the novella is set, has been in the news, firstly because bones ar...
Under the Skin is a reviewer's nightmare - it's literally impossible to discuss this book without touching the plot, and the whole thing hinges on mystery that surrounds it. This is a novel which is all about the big reveal, and Michel Faber delights in teeeeeeasing the reader with the smallest o...
April 2012Miss Fatt and Miss Thinne are not, respectively--although they later become so, monstrously. The apocalypse is full of fish. God didn't create the world, he just found it in the trash heap and thought it was neat. You can fake a Virgin Mary, but you can't make her veil. Something ab...
A word of warning, my friends: I’ll be giving this the hard sell. To begin, please create in your mind’s eye (and ear) the most interesting tour guide imaginable. He knows all about Victorian England – its people, its paradoxes – and what’s more, he knows what you don’t know but would find fas...
The Apple is a hard book to rate. On the one hand, I enjoyed the seven stories contained in it for the additional glimpse they provide into the lives of the characters of The Crimson Petal and the White, one of the best novels I've read this year. On the other hand, they don't provide nearly enou...
They weren’t feeding on him, they were just using him as a place to be. Every time he stretched or coughed, the bugs would hover up from his skin or hop elsewhere, then settle back. He didn’t mind. Their legs didn’t tickle. They were quiet. He’d been awake for hours, resti...
It’s not in the room with her, thank God. It’s coming from down below, from the mews behind the house, where only horses, drunks and thieves usually go. The voice is singing, serenading her, right under her window.To Hell with you, Sugar thinks, and covers her head with a pillow.The voice sings o...
By night, she sampled dance clubs and slept with strange men; by day, she waitressed at her uncle’s restaurant; during spare hours and weekends she combed flea markets and charity shops for cheap T-shirts. White ones mostly though pale grey, bright yellow and fluorescent green were acceptable too...
