Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks

We combine postage, so do look at our other books on offer.

Books dispatched within 2 business days.

Condition : Good

In 1910 a young Englishman, Stephen Wraysford, goes to Picardy, France, to learn the textile business. While there he plunges into a love affair with the young wife of his host, a passion so imperative and consuming that it changes him forever. Several years later, with the outbreak of World War I, he finds himself again in the fields of Picardy, this time as a soldier on the Western Front. A strange, occasionally bitter man, Stephen is possessed of an inexplicable will to survive. He struggles through the hideously bloody battles of the Marne, Verdun, and the Somme (in the last named, thirty thousand British soldiers were killed in the first half hour alone), camps for weeks at a time in the verminous trenches, and hunkers in underground tunnels as he watches many of the companions he has grown to love perish. In spite of everything, Stephen manages to find hope and meaning in the blasted world he inhabits.

Sixty years after war's end, his granddaughter discovers, and keeps, Stephen's promise to a dying man. Sebastian Faulks brings the anguish of love and war to vivid life, and leaves the reader's mind pulsating with images that are graphic and unforgettable.

Ambitious, outrageous, poignant, sleep-disturbing, Birdsong is not a prefect novel--just a great one. --Simon Schama, New Yorker
An amazing book--among the most stirringly erotic I have read for years...I have read it and re-read it and can think of no other novel for many, many years that has so moved me or stimulated in me so much reflection on the human spirit. --Quentin Crewe, Daily Mail
This book is so powerful that as I finished it I turned to the front to start again. --Andrew James, Sunday Express
One of the finest novels of the last 40 years. --Brian Masters, Mail on Sunday
This is literature at its very best: a book with the power to reveal the unimagined, so that one's life is set in a changed context. I urge you to read it. --Nigel Watts, Time Out

About the author (1994)