Sebastian Faulks

Set before and during the great war, Birdsong captures the drama of that era on both a national and a personal scale. It is the story of Stephen, a young Englishman, who arrives in Amiens in 1910. His life goes through a series of traumatic experiences, from the clandestine love affair that tears apart the family with whom he lives, to the unprecedented experiences of the war itself.

Birdsong - Book 2 - French Trilogy

A young Scottish woman who falls in love with a World War II RAF pilot shortly before his plane is lost over France joins the Resistance movement to find him, only to discover a larger meaning in her new role.

A Novel

Charlotte Gray

Follows narrator Mike Engleby through adolescence in the 1970s, as he suffers bouts of memory loss and tells up front that he might or might not have committed the brutal murder of his classmate, Jennifer Arkland.

Engleby

Structured like a thriller, A Week in December takes place over the course of a single week at the end of 2008. Set in London, it brings together an intriguing cast of characters whose lives apparently run on parallel lines but - as gradually becomes clear - are intricately related. The central anti-hero, John Veals, is a shadily successful and boundlessly ambitious Dickensian character who is trading billions. The tentacles of Veals's influence encompass newspaper columnists, MPs, businessmen, footballers, a female tube driver, a Scottish convert to Islam, a disaffected teenager, and a care worker, whose different perspectives build up a tale of love, family and money as the story builds to its powerful climax.

A Week in December

a novel

Ian Fleming

Set in the Cold War, and follows the action of Bond across two contintents and exotic locations after he is assigned to shadow a mysterious, power-crazed pharmaceutical magnate with an interest in opiate deriviates.

Devil May Care

As young boys both Jacques RebiSre and Thomas Midwinter become fascinated with trying to understand the human mind.As psychiatris- ts, their quest takes them from the squalor of the Victorian lunatic asylum to the crowded lecture halls of the renowned Professor Charcot in Paris; from the heights of the Sierra Madre in California to the plains of unexplored Africa. As the concerns of the old century fade and the First World War divides Europe, the two men's volatile relationship develops and changes, but is always tempered by one exceptional woman; Thomas's sister Sonia.Moving and challenging in equal measure, HUMAN TRACES explores the question of what kind of beings men and women really are.

Human Traces

A Times Fiction Book of the Year 'Superb . . . weaves winningly between the present and the second world war, between Tangiers and Paris.' Observer Here is Paris as you have never seen it before - a city in which every building seems to hold the echo of an unacknowledged past, the shadows of Vichy and Algeria. American postdoctoral researcher Hannah and runaway Moroccan teenager Tariq have little in common, yet both are susceptible to the daylight ghosts of Paris. Hannah listens to the extraordinary witness of women who were present under the German Occupation; in her desire to understand their lives, and through them her own, she finds a city bursting with clues and connections. Out in the migrant suburbs, Tariq is searching for a mother he barely knew. For him in his innocence, each boulevard, Métro station and street corner is a source of surprise. In this urgent and deeply moving novel, Faulks deals with questions of empire, grievance and identity. With great originality and a dark humour, Paris Echo asks how much we really need to know if we are to live a valuable life. 'Faulks captures the voice of a century' Sunday Times 'The most impressive novelist of his generation' Sunday Telegraph

Paris Echo

SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLER 'A fine and profoundly intelligent novel' ELIZABETH DAY 'A yearning, wistful, lovelorn novel, intent on exploring the price of being human' Sunday Times _____________________ 1914: Aspiring journalist Anton arrives in Vienna where he meets Delphine, a woman of experience and deep secrets. Entranced by the light of first love, Anton comes to life. Until his country declares war on hers. 1927: For Lena, life with her mother in a small town has been cosseted and cold. After a few years of schooling, she encounters a young lawyer who spirits her away to Vienna. However, what she imagines to be love soon crumbles, and she leaves the city behind to take a post at the snow-capped sanatorium, the Schloss Seeblick. 1933: Having lost many friends on the Eastern Front, Anton is sent to write about the mysterious Schloss Seeblick. In this place, on the banks of a silvery lake where the roots of human suffering are laid bare, two people will see each other as if for the first time. _____________________ Sweeping across Europe as it recovers from one war and awaits the coming of another, SNOW COUNTRY is a landmark novel of exquisite yearnings, dreams of youth and the sanctity of hope. In elegant, shimmering prose, Sebastian Faulks has produced an epic love story of timeless resonance. _____________________ 'Faulks on his best form' Telegraph 'Fascinating . . . impeccably researched . . . At the heart of this rich, dark story, however, is not politics but psychology . . . Faulks's committed fans will be left looking forward to the next instalment of this thought-provoking trilogy' The Times 'A magnificent, moving novel' Independent 'Faulks's most poignant love story yet' Antony Beevor 'A tale of love - lost and found - and the strength of the human spirit' Sunday Telegraph

Snow Country

The new bestseller from the author of Birdsong and A Week in December. "You don't live the life I have without making some enemies." Having accepted a strange but intriguing invitation to a French island, psychiatrist Robert Hendricks meets the man who has commissioned him to write a biography. But his subject seems more interested in finding out about Robert's past than he does in revealing his own. For years, Robert has refused to discuss his past. After the war ended, he refused to go to reunions, believing in some way that denying the killing and the deaths of his friends and fellow soldiers would mean he wouldn't be defined by the experience. Suddenly, he can't keep the memories from overtaking him. But can he trust his memories and can we believe what other people tell us about theirs? Moving between the present and past, between France and Italy, New York and London, this is a powerful story about love and war, memory and desire, the relationship between the body and the mind. Compelling and full of suspense, Where My Heart Used to Beat is a tender, brutal and thoughtful portrait of a man and a century, which asks whether, given the carnage we've witnessed and inflicted over the past one hundred years, people can ever be the same.

Where My Heart Used to Beat

The appearance of a pretty but troubled girl at a shabby hotel in 1930s France spells trouble for a married veteran of the Great War. Reprint. 60,000 first printing.

The Girl at the Lion D'or

From the critically acclaimed, bestselling author of Birdsong, new fiction about love and war—five transporting stories and five unforgettable lives, linked across centuries. In Second World War Poland, a young prisoner closes his eyes and pictures going to bat on a sunlit English cricket ground. Across the yard of a Victorian poorhouse, a man is too ashamed to acknowledge the son he gave away. In a 19th-century French village, an old servant understands—suddenly and with awe—the meaning of the Bible story her master is reading to her. On a summer evening in the Catskills in 1971, a skinny girl steps out of a Chevy with a guitar and with a song that will send shivers through her listeners' skulls. A few years from now, in Italy, a gifted scientist discovers links between time and the human brain and between her lover's novel and his life. Throughout the five masterpieces of fiction that make up A Possible Life, exquisitely drawn and unforgettable characters risk their bodies, hearts and minds in pursuit of the manna of human connection. Between soldier and lover, parent and child, servant and master, and artist and muse, important pleasures and pains are born of love, separations and missed opportunities. These interactions—whether successful or not—also affect the long trajectories of characters' lives. Provocative and profound, Sebastian Faulks's dazzling new novel journeys across continents and centuries not only to entertain with superb old-fashioned storytelling but to show that occasions of understanding between humans are the one thing that defines us—and that those moments, however fluid, are the one thing that endures.

A Novel in Five Love Stories

A Possible Life

In 1960, Mary van der Linden, a loyal daughter, wife, and mother approaching forty, moves with her family from London to Washington, D.C., where she escapes her narrow world for the larger issues of politics and the Cold War with the help of Frank, a New York journalist, who introduces her to Miles Davis, Greenwich Village, and adultery. Reader's Guide available. Reprint. 50,000 first printing.

On Green Dolphin Street

When young man about town Bertie Wooster, nursing a broken heart, agrees to help his old friend Peregrine Woody Beeching, whose own romance is failing, hilarity and chaos ensue as Jeeves, the very epitome of the modern manservant, steps in to save Bertie from himself. 100,000 first printing.

Jeeves and the Wedding Bells

The British invented the novel, with the publication of Robinson Crusoe in 1719 marking the arrival of a revolutionary and distinctly modern form of art. But it's also true, as Sebastian Faulks argues in this remarkable book, that the novel helped invent the British- for the first time we had stories that reflected the experiences of ordinary people, with characters in which we could find our reality, our understanding and our escape. In The Secret Life of the Novel, Faulks examines many of these enduring fictional characters from over the centuries - Heroes from Tom Jones to John Self, Lovers from Mr Darcy to Lady Chatterly, Villains from Fagin to Barbara Covett, and Snobs from Emma Woodhouse to James Bond - and shows us how they mapped and inspired the British psyche, and continue to do so. Published to coincide with a major BBC series, The Secret Life of the Novel is an engaging and opinionated look at the psychology of the British through their literature, and a unique social history of Britain from one of our most respected writers.

Great British Characters and the Secret Life of the Novel

Faulks on Fiction

"Beautifully written and--extraordinarily moving."--The Sunday Times (London) From the author of the international bestseller Birdsong, comes a haunting historical novel of passion, loss, and courage set in France between the two world wars. This Vintage Original edition marks its first appearance in the United States. On a rainy night in the 1930s, Anne Louvet appears at the run-down Hotel du Lion d'Or in the village of Janvilliers. She is seeking a job and a new life, one far removed from the awful injustices of her past. As Anne embarks on a torrential love affair with a married veteran of the Great War, The Girl at the Lion d'Or fashions an unbreakable spell of narrative and atmosphere that evokes French masters from Flaubert to Renoir. "This moving and profound novel is perfectly constructed, and admirable in its configurations of place and period."--The Times (London) "I would urge those who appreciated--The French Lieutenant's Woman to try this one--. They may well think it superior."--Sunday Telegraph (London)

The Girl at the Lion d'Or

A novel set in 2007 London follows seven diverse characters, exploring the complex patterns and crossings of modern urban life and culminating in a climax where each character is forced to confront the true nature of the world they inhabit. By the author of Devil May Care.

THE INSTANT SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLER 'A genuinely thought-provoking piece of fiction' THE TIMES 'Extraordinary' WILLIAM BOYD 'Profoundly moving . . . a wonderful and life-affirming love story' JAMES HOLLAND 'His greatest novel yet' ANTONY BEEVOR 'Original and enthralling' PETER JAMES ‘A beautifully written novel. On the one hand you have love, kindness, responsibility; on the other monstrous arrogance and indifference to consequences’ SCOTSMAN A CHILD WILL BE BORN WHO WILL CHANGE EVERYTHING When a young American academic Talissa Adam offers to carry another woman's child, she has no idea of the life-changing consequences. Behind the doors of the Parn Institute, a billionaire entrepreneur plans to stretch the boundaries of ethics as never before. Through a series of IVF treatments, which they hope to keep secret, they propose an experiment that will upend the human race as we know it. Seth, the baby, is delivered to hopeful parents Mary and Alaric, but when his differences start to mark him out from his peers, he begins to attract unwanted attention. The Seventh Son is a spectacular examination of what it is to be human. It asks the question: just because you can do something, does it mean you should? Sweeping between New York, London, and the Scottish Highlands, this is an extraordinary novel about unrequited love and unearned power.

The instant Sunday Times bestseller

The Seventh Son

Paris Echo: A Novel

In The Fatal Englishman, his first work of nonfiction, Sebastian Faulks explores the lives of three remarkable men. Each had the seeds of greatness; each was a beacon to his generation and left something of value behind; yet each one died tragically young. Christopher Wood, only twenty-nine when he killed himself, was a painter who lived most of his short life in the beau monde of 1920s Paris, where his charm, good looks, and the dissolute life that followed them sometimes frustrated his ambition and achievement as an artist. Richard Hillary was a WWII fighter pilot who wrote a classic account of his experiences, The Last Enemy, but died in a mysterious training accident while defying doctor’s orders to stay grounded after horrific burn injuries; he was twenty-three. Jeremy Wolfenden, hailed by his contemporaries as the brightest Englishman of his generation, rejected the call of academia to become a hack journalist in Cold War Moscow. A spy, alcoholic, and open homosexual at a time when such activity was still illegal, he died at the age of thirty-one, a victim of his own recklessness and of the peculiar pressures of his time. Through the lives of these doomed young men, Faulks paints an oblique portrait of English society as it changed in the twentieth century, from the Victorian era to the modern world.

Sebastian Faulks

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