Since 1988, when her first novel The Bean Trees was published, Barbara Kingsolver has become one of the world’s most admired writers. Her 1998 novel The Poisonwood Bible was picked for Oprah’s Book Club and was shortlisted for the Orange Prize. This year she went one better, winning the Orange Prize for Fiction with The Lacuna. We were thrilled that she found time on a flying visit to the UK in July to tell us more about it.

Download this special Faber Podcast here.

Read also: A Q & A with Barbara Kingsolver

More on: The Lacuna

Jo Shapcott is the award-winning author of Electroplating the Baby, Phrase Book and My Life Asleep, which were gathered together in a selected poems, Her Book.

Of Mutability

Her new collection Of Mutability explores the concept of change – in nature, in the body and in human interaction. As a collection it celebrates the small wonders of life, acting as a reminder of its transience.

Jo Shapcott discusses this new collection as well as her earlier work in the new Faber Podcast – listen here. The interview is interspersed with a selections of readings.

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Jo also recorded several video readings for us, which you can view on Faber’s Vimeo channel.

Jo Shapcott reads ‘A Letter to Dennis’ from FaberBooks on Vimeo.

Paul Dirac: The Strangest Man

It’s very rare for a science book to win the Costa (or Whitbread as it used to be) Biography Award, but that’s just what Graham Farmelo’s The Strangest Man: The Hidden Life of Paul Dirac has done this year. The Costa judges said, ‘The extraordinary mind and achievements of Britain’s Einstein are rendered here in the most compelling biography of the year.’ Just as significantly, the reviewers at Physics World named it their book of the year for 2009, though they stressed that you don’t need to be a professional physicist, academic or boffin to understand it and enjoy it. That’s one of the skills of a great biographer – to make a subject available beyond its core audience.

Paul Dirac was one of the pioneers of quantum physics, perhaps the greatest theoretical physicist since Isaac Newton, and was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1933. Yet little was known about him – his genius went largely unrecognised – largely because of Dirac’s reticence.

Graham Farmelo’s book is a welcome reminder – or an introduction – to an icon of modern thought. Our interview with Farmelo (recorded in January last year) is well worth a listen.

Tobias Jones’s first book for Faber was The Dark Heart of Italy (2006), his critically acclaimed exposé of the darker side of Italian life, the flip side of la dolce vita, a nation riddled with corruption and political skullduggery – an anti-tourist guide. For his second book Tobias went in search of the good life – Utopian Dreams (2007) investigated alternatives, both religious and secular, to a 21st-century way of life obsessed by materialism and selfish gain. Again, a travel book with a difference.

The Salati Case

In his third book Tobias has returned to Italy, pursuing its dark heart, but this time through crime fiction. The Salati Case is the first in a series of crime novels set in the northern Italian city of Parma, featuring a new detective on the block, Castagnetti.

In a 20-minute interview for our December Faber Podcast, a Crime double-hander with Nicola Upson, Tobias Jones introduces his new detective and explains his fondness for bees; he reveals which writers and characters left their mark on him as a writer, in particular the influence of American crime writer Ross Macdonald; he outlines just what the Salati Case is; and he lets us in on what’s lined up for the second outing for Castagnetti, White Death.

You can download our interview with Tobias Jones here. Our interviewer, George Miller, also filmed this short piece.

The Salati Case is available now in paperback.