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Michaelmas term, 1940. 18-year-old John Kemp has come down from Lancashire to Oxford University to begin his scholarship studying English. But when he invents an imaginary sister to win the attention of a rich but unreliable ‘friend’, and then falls in love for real, undergraduate life becomes its own strange, complex world …
‘The best-loved English poet of the past 100 years.’ Sunday Times
‘Absolutely contemporary – perhaps even prophetic.’ Joyce Carol Oates
‘Remarkable … A book about innocence.’ Simon Garfield
‘A cryptic literary manifesto [about] discovering a literary personality, and the consolation art can provide.’ Andrew Motion
Philip Larkin, poet, novelist and librarian, was born in Coventry in 1922. He published four volumes of poetry – The North Ship (1945), The Less Deceived (1955), The Whitsun Weddings (1964) and High Windows (1974) – for which he received innumerable honours including the Queen’s Gold Medal for Poetry and the WH Smith Award. He also wrote two novels, Jill (1946) and A Girl in Winter (1947), and his journalism is collected in two volumes, All…
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Since its creation in 1925 Faber & Faber has always been based in or close to a Bloomsbury square, in …
For our book club selection this August, we revisit Philip Larkin’s much-loved collection of poems, The Whitsun Weddings.
A century after his birth, we mark the Philip Larkin centenary in 2022. To celebrate a new edition of his …
Celebrating our 90th anniversary, Faber staff take on the tricky task of selecting their three favourite Faber books.
In the Philip Larkin's centenary year, we republish an article remembering him by autobiographer and publisher Jean Hartley.