have published his work in the UK ever since. Faber's first published book was a collection of short stories, Some Rain Must Fall, issued in 1998. Of these stories, the title piece had won the Ian St James Award in 1996, "Fish" had won the Macallan Prize in 1996, and "Half a Million Pounds and a Miracle" had won the Neil Gunn Award in 1997. The first of Faber's novels to be published was Under the Skin (2000), written in, and inspired by, the Scottish Highlands. Like much of Faber's work, it defies easy categorisation, combining elements of the science fiction, horror and thriller genres, handled with sufficient depth and nuance to win almost unanimous praise from literary critics. It was translated into many languages (17 by 2004) and secured his reputation in Europe, as well as being shortlisted for the Whitbread First Novel Award. Faber's second published novel was The Hundred and Ninety-Nine Steps (2001), set in Whitby. The original hardback edition included digitally manipulated colour photographs; these were absent from subsequent reissues. Radically different from Under The Skin in tone and theme, The Hundred and Ninety-Nine Steps attracted mixed reviews. Faber's third published novel was The Courage Consort (2002), about an a cappella vocal group rehearsing a piece of avant-garde music. In 2002, Faber's 850-page The Crimson Petal and the White was published. Set in 1870s London and principally concerning a 19-year-old prostitute called Sugar, it was described by some critics as postmodern while others echoed the assertion (made in an early review) that it was "the novel that Dickens might have written had he been allowed to speak freely". Twenty years in the writing, the book showed Faber's admiration for Dickens' prose and George Eliot's narrative architecture, but its themes were informed by feminism, post-Freudian awareness of sexual pathology, and post-Marxian class analysis, as well as by unrestricted access to Victorian pornographic texts that had been suppressed until the late 20th century. The Crimson Petal and the White was a bestseller in the US, Italy, France, Holland and Belgium, and a steady seller in most other countries. Faber's second collection of short stories The Fahrenheit Twins was published in 2005. Its opening story, "The Safehouse", won second place in the inaugural National Short Story Prize (since renamed the BBC National Short Story Award) in 2005. Wary of being pigeonholed, particularly in the United States where The Crimson