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. 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. 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. A strange, occasionally bitter man, Stephen is possessed of an inexplicable will to survive. 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. 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. Sebastian Faulks is best known for his trilogy of novels set in France: The Girl at the Lion dOr, Birdsong, and Charlotte Gray, the latter two of which. '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.In 1910 a young Englishman, Stephen Wraysford, goes to Picardy, France, to learn the textile business. The novel Birdsong is set mainly during the First World War and through its central character, Stephen Wraysford.

'One of the finest novels of the last forty years' * Mail on Sunday * 'This is a great love story' - Prue Leith * Daily Express * 'Engrossing, moving, and unforgettable' * The Times * Ambitious, outrageous, poignant, sleep-disturbing, Birdsong is not a perfect novel, just a great one' - Simon Schama * New Yorker *

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' * Daily Mail *

It has also been adapted three times under the same title: for radio (1997), the stage (2010) and television (2012). This book is so powerful that as I finished it I turned to the front to start again' * Sunday Express * Birdsong is one of Faulks's best received works, earning both critical and popular praise, including being listed as the 13th favourite book in Britain in a 2003 BBC survey called the Big Read. 'With Birdsong Faulks has produced a mesmerizing story of love and war. 'Magnificent - deeply moving' * Sunday Times *

Birdsong by sebastian faulks