Product Description

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.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #468 in Books
• Published on: 1994-07-18
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 528 pages

Amazon.co.uk Review
Readers who are entranced by sweeping historical sagas will devour Birdsong, Sebastian Faulks' drama set during the first world war. There's even a little high-toned erotica thrown into the mix to convince the doubtful. The book's hero, a 20-year-old Englishman named Stephen Wraysford, finds his true love on a trip to Amiens in 1910. Unfortunately, she's already married, the wife of a wealthy textile baron. Wrayford convinces her to leave a life of passionless comfort to be at his side, but things do not turn out according to plan. Wraysford is haunted by this doomed affair and carries it with him into the trenches of the war. Birdsong derives most of its power from its descriptions of mud and blood, and Wraysford's attempt to retain a scrap of humanity while surrounded by it. There is a simultaneous description of his present-day granddaughter's quest to read his diaries, which is designed to give some sense of perspective; this device is only somewhat successful. Nevertheless, Birdsong is a rewarding read, an unflinching war story and a touching romance.

Review
Curiously, it is the fighting in World War I more than World War II that resonates in the imagination of contemporary writers. Its now unimaginable and unimaginative killing fields, commemorated by the rows of simple white crosses, reverberates now as much as ever. Birdsong is possibly the finest example of this cross-fertilization, pipping Pat Barker and Geoff Dyer to the post. After beginning in Amiens, France, in 1910, the action of this much-praised novel shifts between the French battlefields of the First World War and suburban England in the late 1970s. It is both a passionate love story and a tale of camaraderie and isolation in war. (Kirkus UK)

Faulks's fourth novel, an English bestseller, is his second (after A Fool's Alphabet, 1993) to appear in the US: a riveting story of love - and incalculable suffering - during WW I. What could become mere period romance is transformed, in this writer's hands, into dramatized history with a power almost Tolstoyan. Faulks renders love as compellingly as war - as in the opening chapters, when 20-year-old Britisher Stephen Wraysford, on business in Amiens, falls passionately in love with the childless and unhappily married Isabelle Azaire, nine years his senior, and steals her away. This is in 1910, and when Isabelle, secretly pregnant, suffers from overwhelming guilt, she abandons Stephen, returning to her unloving husband; six years later, Wraysford is near Amiens again, now as a Lieutenant (soon Captain) with the British Expeditionary Force, preparing for battle in what is to be the butchery of the Somme valley. Isabelle and Wraysford will meet briefly again - and both will be changed forever by the catastrophic war about to sweep over humanity, changing entire generations. Fauiks's depictions of war in the trenches - and in the mazes of deadly tunnels beneath them - are extraordinary, graphic, powerful, and unsparing. Stephen will survive to war's end, and so will Isabelle, though not before both are changed beyond recognition, and doomed not to be rejoined again. The war, here, is Faulks's real subject, his stories of destroyed lives, however wrenching, only throwing its horror into greater relief and making it the more unbearable. An ending too neatly symbolic can be pardoned, while a denouement describing the birth of Wraysford's and Isabelle's great-grandson - in 1979, when their lost histories have been ferreted out by a granddaughter named Elizabeth, the new mother - is so perfectly conceived and delivered as to bring tears to the reader insufficiently steeled. Once more, Faulks shows his unparalleled strengths as a writer of plain human life and high, high compassion. A wonderful book, ringing with truth. (Kirkus Reviews)

From the Publisher
Powerful and moving bestselling fiction from one of today's greatest living writers.

Customer Reviews

Under - welming
Took this book on a recent 7 day holiday - it looked my sort of stuff.
Read about 40% of it then tossed it onto the holiday home library shelf and selected the best of what had been left.
Birdsong is tedious and poorly written. The characters are not engaging - it's just not worth the eye power in reading it.
A bit like the movie "Atonement" - it's not unpleasant, you could watch it, it will do no harm but there are many far far better films.
Birdsong is touted as a modern classic - it is no such thing.

A slog
I tried but it just didn't work for me. The descriptive narrative was a lot of effort for little progress.

Brilliant
This book is amazing. I was so moved by the story, it is so well written it is like you are reliving the experineces of the characters and there with them through their ups and downs. I found it to be emotionally draining in places, but worth every second.