At the heart of this panoramic, multidimensional narrative is the compelling struggle of a young woman to lift her body and soul out of the gutter. Faber leads us back to 1870s London, where Sugar, a nineteen-year-old whore in the brothel of the terrifying Mrs. Castaway, yearns for escape to a better life. Her ascent through the strata of Victorian society offers us intimacy with a host of lovable, maddening, unforgettable characters. They begin with...

As Moll Flanders rises from the infamous Newgate Prison to fame, wealth, and respectability, Moll comes to embody all the excess and vitality of an era.

Curmudgeonly barrister Horace Rumpole struggles to defend a Pakistani doctor who has been falsely acused of aiding al Qaeda, an effort that is complicated by Rumpole's exacting wife's decision to record her life story.

Set on the crazier fringes of 1950s literary London, A Far Cry from Kensington is a delight, hilariously portraying love, fraud, death, evil, and transformation. Mrs. Hawkins, the majestic narrator of A Far Cry from Kensington, takes us well in hand and leads us back to her threadbare years in postwar London. There, as a fat and much admired young war widow, she spent her days working for a mad, near-bankrupt publisher (“of very good books”) and...

Attempting to blaze a new trail for women at the University College London in 1923, research assistant Saffron Everleigh becomes involved in solving the murder of a professor's wife who appeared to have been poisoned at a school dinner party.

Portrays a terrifying vision of life in the future when a totalitarian government, considered a "Negative Utopia," watches over all citizens and directs all activities, becoming more powerful as time goes by.