Product Description

In 1942, Charlotte Gray goes to Occupied France on a duel mission, to run a simple errand for a British special operations group and to find her lover, an English airman who has gone missing in action. It is in the town of Lavaurette that she finds friendship and experiences life under Nazi rule. From the author of BIRDSONG.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #321877 in Books
• Published on: 2002-01-24
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 400 pages

Amazon.co.uk Review
Sebastian Faulks established his authority as a storyteller with his best-selling Birdsong. His next book, Charlotte Gray, a haunting story of love and war set in London and occupied France in 1942-3, is loosely a sequel. Charlotte is a highly educated young Scottish woman who falls passionately in love with an airman, Peter Gregory, emotionally scarred by his many close brushes with death. When he disappears on a mission to France, she follows him as a British secret courier, sent over to help support the Resistance. Having failed to find Gregory, she decides to stay on to do what she can for the France she has loved since childhood. She and the reader are drawn ever deeper into the lives of assimilated French Jews-- the children Andre and Jacob whose parents have already been sent to the death camps, and the Levades, father and son. Though ultimately powerless to help, Charlotte nevertheless learns a far deeper understanding of herself and her own family through them.

This is a book full of insight into the way civilisation can slip into barbarism. Its haunting themes of memory and passion stay with you long after you have finished reading. --Lisa Jardine

Review
British reviewers' praise for Charlotte Gray:
"It would take a mile-long essay to do justice to the many virtues of Sebastian Faulks's wonderful new novel. This riveting account of a young Scotswoman's odyssey through wartime London, and on into a perilous secret mission in Vichy France, deserves the highest praise. . . . Proustian cogitations, masterful narrative, and zestful pen portraits. A beautiful, near-masterpiece."--The Independent on Sunday
"One of the most impressive novelists of his generation . . . who is growing in authority with every book."
--Sunday Telegraph
"A worthy successor to Birdsong. It is hard to imagine anyone who enjoyed the last novel not finding great interest and pleasure in this one. In Charlotte, Faulks has created a wonderfully complex and engaging heroine, with whom it is hard not to fall a little in love."--Daily Express
"Faulks has the rare gift of being popular and literary at the same time. Its page-turning quality in no way undermines the darkness that it describes."--Literary Review
"Faulks is beyond doubt a master."--Financial Times

Praise for Birdsong:
"Overpowering and beautiful . . . A great novel."--Simon Schama, The New Yorker
"The ordinary superlatives do not suffice in this case. Birdsong moved me more profoundly than anything I've read in years. A deeply compassionate, utterly thrilling work by a master of the form."--Frank Conroy
"Worthy in every way of its honors and success . . . so powerful as to be almost unbearable."--George Garrett, Los Angeles Times Book Review
"A contemporary novel that . . . earns a place on the shelf with true literature. . . . Superb storytelling andcraftsmanship."--People

"From the Hardcover edition."

Financial Times
‘Novelists are maters of the imagination. Faulks is no doubt a master’

Customer Reviews

Much better than Birdsong
I seem to be alone in not finding Birdsong the most marvellous book ever - possibly because I read it just after Pat Barker's Regeneration trilogy, which I found much more involving.

The problem I had with Birdsong was that, when reading about an event in which millions of people died, I find it hard to care about a single love affair. It is very difficult to write about such tragic and all-consuming world events without reducing the love lives of two single people to triviality.

Charlotte Grey somehow transcended this, making the love plot both moving, involving and seemingly symbolic of all the hope and suffering that participants in the war must have experienced. The beautiful writing and marvellously realised, convincing and sympathetic characters give the affair a sense of universality. Even against the grim and traumatic backdrop of the Vichy government's collaberation with the Germans and their seemingly enthusiastic participation in the persecution of the Jews, Charlotte's love affair and her struggle for personal happiness seem both engrossing and important.

On top of that, I found it a real page-turner - couldn't stop reading it. Great, great book.

Rich but deeply disturbing - not for the faint-hearted
Having only ever read (and enjoyed) Faulks' "Birdsong" before I looked forward to meeting Charlotte Gray. I was not disappointed.

This is a moving and disturbing story of one young woman's experiences as an undercover courier in France during the 1940's. Charlotte comes over almost as an anti-hero, she is at once sophisticated yet naive, caring yet callous, brave yet timid (or foolhardy?). Although the main plot revolves around her attempts to track down her English lover, reported as missing in action after being shot down over France, this is NOT a love story. The imagery created by the narrative puts you deep in the heart of war-torn France, with all the personal conflicts and emotions of the people involved on all sides. The sub-plot around the two Jewish boys, tragically separated from their parents ... is the most moving part of the book. Told through their eyes, we feel their innocence and the way they instinctively trust and follow any adult they come into contact with, secure in the mistaken belief that they will one day be reunited with their parents. WE know what is happening to them - THEY don't. Their final scene ... almost made me cry. We should all be ashamed of man's inhumanity to man at times of war. Charlotte too, in tracing the boys to a "work camp", herself naively believes that the boys will only to put to work. We never know if she realises at the end exactly how far from the truth she was ...

The book's only flaw is the half-hearted attempt to examine Charlotte's relationship with her father. I felt it had no real bearing on the development of her character ...

All in all, a great read. But prepare to be traumatised, and have some misconceptions about the French Resistance movement shattered.

Another view of Occupied France...
I bought this book for the author rather than the story, 'Birdsong' being one of the most powerful books I have ever had the pleasure to read. It certainly is a different kind of story (and War) and I only realised the connection with one of the Birdsong characters when I was well into this book. I cannot say I found it a riveting read for most of the book, but what comes across strongly is the internal struggle in France during the Second World War,not so much with the Occupier, but between the French themselves. This manifests itself in Charlotte Gray's dealings with individuals and the various factions, all of whom seem to have different agendas. Most hate the Germans, some the British, and some their own French countrymen.I had never appreciated the division and strength of feeling, and ultimately what it did to some, namely the Jewish people. What builds to an inevitible and awful conclusion in the last 50 or so pages of the book, eclipses the rest to the extent that nothing else seemed to have happened. It brings the Holocaust down to an individual level where the suffering is almost too much to contemplate, and focuses on three people, two of them young children, amongst the tide of humanity caught up in that horrendous and dark period of our social history. This is but a small part of the book, but will remain in one's mind for a long time.