And the fact that my wife was terminally ill throughout the writing of it had a huge effect on it. This book was the most deeply instinctive novel I ever wrote. But in this book I got back to the essence of it. In much of my work I'm tackling alienation and the various gulfs – cultural, sexual, political, generational, linguistic, historical, etc – that make it difficult for one human being to understand another.

There are connections between Under The Skin and The Book of Strange New Things, and not just the obvious ones that might occur to a casual reader like aliens and the sci-fi setting. Like, how painful it can be, but how necessary and rewarding too, to ask what it is that make us 'human', and what's a life worth caring for? Did The Book of Strange New Things feel in any way like a return to the ideas that had been in your head during 'Under The Skin'? 'The Book of Strange New Things' is apparently going to be your last book, and it seems to share some themes with 'Under the Skin', your first. Ahead of his appearance on Sunday at the West Cork Literary Festival, he discusses why he loves unfaithful adaptations of his work, his struggle with religion and the overlaps in his life and work.

Written while caring for his own wife, Eva, who was dying of cancer, Faber's final book is a heartbreakingly intimate look at love, faith and what matters in cases of life and death. His latest novel, which he claims also to be his last, is called The Book of Strange New Things and it follows a Christian missionary named Peter as he attempts to bring the word of God to an alien people on the other side of the universe while his wife, Bea, deals with the world falling apart back home. His second, The Crimson Petal and the White, was set in Victorian England and investigated class, sex and the moral issues of the time.īorn in the Netherlands, but raised in Australia, Faber has lived in the UK since the late 1980s and his eye for noticing the uncanny and strange hidden beneath the everyday habits of British culture has helped to give his books both keen insight and a wry sense of humour. His first novel, Under The Skin, examined life along a remote Scottish motorway from the perspective of a dog-like alien who had undergone extensive reconstructive surgery. Over the past 20-odd years, Michel Faber's writing has been anything but predictable.

Under the skin by michel faber