Most Popular Books by Sebastian Faulks

While staying as the guest of a factory owner in pre-First World War France, Stephen Wraysford embarks on a passionate affair with Isabelle, the wife of his host. The affair changes them both for ever.A few years later Stephen finds himself back in the same part of France, but this time as a soldier in the Battle of the Somme, the bloodiest encounter in British military history. As his men die around him, Stephen turns to his enduring love for Isabelle for the strength to continue and to save something for future generations. For the first time, this beautiful and terrible story about love, courage and the endurance of the human spirit is brought to the stage in a version by Rachel Wagstaff, directed by famed director Trevor Nunn.

In the blustery final days of 2007, seven characters will reach an unexpected turning point: a hedge fund manager pulling off a trade, a professional football player recently arrived from Poland, a young lawyer with too much time on his hands, a student led astray by Islamist theory, a hack book reviewer, a schoolboy hooked on pot and reality TV, and a Tube train driver whose Circle Line train joins these lives in a daily loop. And as the novel moves to its gripping climax, they are forced, one by one, to confront the new world they inhabit. Panoramic and masterful, A Week in December melds moral heft and piercing wit, holding a mirror up to the complex patterns and crossings of modern urban life.

Bestselling British author Faulks reinvents the unreliable narrator with his singular, haunting creation Mike Engleby, who leads the reader down an unclear and often darkly humorous path where one is never completely comfortable or confident about what is true.

“Cunningly crafted. . . . France’s unquiet histories are brought to life by a master storyteller.” —Financial Times (UK) A story of resistance, complicity, and an unlikely, transformative friendship, set in Paris, from internationally bestselling novelist Sebastian Faulks. American historian Hannah intends to immerse herself in World War II research in Paris, wary of paying much attention to the city where a youthful misadventure once left her dejected. But a chance encounter with Tariq, a Moroccan teenager whose visions of the City of Lights as a world of opportunity and rebirth starkly contrast with her own, disrupts her plan. Hannah agrees to take Tariq in as a lodger, forming an unexpected connection with the young man. Yet as Tariq begins to assimilate into the country he risked his life to enter, he realizes that its dark past and current ills are far more complicated than he’d anticipated. And Hannah, diving deeper into her work on women’s lives in Nazi-occupied Paris, uncovers a shocking piece of history that threatens to dismantle her core beliefs. Soon they each must question which sacrifices are worth their happiness and what, if anything, the tumultuous past century can teach them about the future. From the sweltering streets of Tangier to deep beneath Paris via the Metro, from the affecting recorded accounts of women in German-occupied France and into the future through our hopes for these characters, Paris Echo offers a tough and poignant story of injustices and dreams.

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

"A novel that artfully mixes memory and desire as a World War II veteran accesses painful memories of a wartime romance" from the author of The Seventh Son ( Kirkus Reviews, starred review). London, 1980. Robert Hendricks, an established psychiatrist and author, has so bottled up memories of his own wartime past that he is nearly sunk into a life of aloneness and depression. Out of the blue, a baffling letter arrives from one Dr. Alexander Pereira, a neurologist and a World War I veteran who claims to be an admirer of Robert''s published work. The letter brings Robert to the older man''s home on a rocky, secluded island off the south of France, and into tempests of memories—his childhood as a fatherless English boy, the carnage he witnessed and the wound he can''t remember receiving as a young officer in World War II, and, above all, the great, devastating love of his life, an Italian woman, "L," whom he met during the war. As Robert''s recollections pour forth, he''s unsure whether they will lead to psychosis—or redemption. But Dr. Pereira knows. Profoundly affecting and masterfully told, Where My Heart Used to Beat sweeps through the 20th century, brilliantly interrogating the darkest corners of the human mind and bearing tender witness to the abiding strength of love. " Where My Heart Used to Beat . . . has wonderful strengths, especially Faulks'' lucid, philosophical voice, and it''s filled with scenes of genuine power." — USA Today "Faulks'' appeal and popularity come from his confident balancing of historically accurate detail with ardent . . . sympathy for passionate private lives." — The New York Times Book Review "A profoundly moving novel." — The Independent (UK)

LONGLISTED FOR THE WALTER SCOTT PRIZE FOR HISTORICAL FICTION A SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLER Snow Country is the spectacular, sweeping new novel from the internationally acclaimed author of Birdsong and Human Traces. Looking back to the Vienna of Klimt and Freud and forward to the shadow that is starting to fall over Europe, Sebastian Faulks''s new novel is an intensely personal story that focuses on Lena, a spirited girl born with nothing, and Anton, a man of passion and self-doubt. Lena was born with nothing but her own strength of character to an alcoholic mother in a small town in southern Austria in 1906. Anton is the restless son of a bourgeois family who sets out to make his fortune in pre-First World War Vienna. Their lives become fatally entwined at the Schloss Seeblick in 1933, with Europe precariously placed between two wars. Snow Country is a landmark novel of exquisite yearnings, dreams of youth, and the sanctity of hope. In elegeant, shimmering prose, Sebastian Faulks has produced a work of timeless resonance.

Faulks''s first novel since the extraordinary success of Birdsong is written with the same passion, power and breadth of vision. Set in England and France during the darkest days of World War II, Charlotte Gray, like Birdsong, depicts a complex love affair that is both shaped and thwarted by war. It is 1942. London is blacked out, but France is under a greater darkness, as the occupying Nazi forces encroach ever closer in a tense waiting game. Charlotte Gray, a volatile but determined young woman, travels south from Edinburgh. Working in London, she has a brief but intense love affair with an RAF pilot. When his plane is lost over France, she contrives to go there herself to work in the Resistance and to search for him--but then is unwilling to leave as she finds that the struggle for the country''s fate is intimately linked to her own battle to take control of her life. Faulks''s novel is an examination of lost paradises, politics without belief, the limits of memory, the redemptive power of art and the existence of hope beyond reason. It is also a brilliant evocation of life in Occupied France and, more significantly, a revelation of the appalling price many Frenchmen paid to survive in unoccupied, so-called Free France. As the men, women and children of Charlotte''s small town prepare to meet their terrible destiny, the truth of what took place in wartime France is finally exposed. When private lives and public events fatally collide, the roots of the characters'' lives are torn up and exposed. These harrowing scenes are presented with the passion and narrative force that readers will recall from Birdsong. Charlotte Gray will attract even more readers to Faulks''s remarkable fiction.

The publication of Robinson Crusoe in London in 1719 marked the arrival of a revolutionary art form: the novel. British writers were prominent in shaping the new type of storytelling - one which reflected the experiences of ordinary people, with characters in whom readers could find not only an escape, but a deeper understanding of their own lives. But the novel was more than just a reflection of British life. As Sebastian Faulks explains in this engaging literary and social history, it also helped invent the British. By focusing not on writers but on the people they gave us, Faulks not only celebrates the recently neglected act of novelistic creation but shows how the most enduring fictional characters over the centuries have helped map the British psyche. In this ebook, Sebastian celebrates the greatest lovers in fiction - from Mr Darcy to Lady Chatterley. Also included are three classic novels: Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen: Accomplished Elizabeth Bennett must navigate a web of familial obligations and social expectations in this witty drama of friendship, rivalry, enmity and love. Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë: The story of an all consuming love which knows no boundary between life and death, Emily Brontë''s novel is a stunningly original and shocking exploration of obsessive passion. Tess of the D''Urbervilles by Thomas Hardy: In a bid to alleviate her family''s poverty, Tess visits the D''Urbervilles and unwittingly sets out on a path of suffering, love, social inequality and betrayal.

The publication of Robinson Crusoe in London in 1719 marked the arrival of a revolutionary art form: the novel. British writers were prominent in shaping the new type of storytelling - one which reflected the experiences of ordinary people, with characters in whom readers could find not only an escape, but a deeper understanding of their own lives. But the novel was more than just a reflection of British life. As Sebastian Faulks explains in this engaging literary and social history, it also helped invent the British. By focusing not on writers but on the people they gave us, Faulks not only celebrates the recently neglected act of novelistic creation baplaudsut shows how the most enduring fictional characters over the centuries have helped map the British psyche. In this ebook, Sebastian celebrates the greatest heroes in fiction - from Tom Jones to Sherlock Holmes. Also included are three classic novels: Robinson Crusoe by Daniel Defoe: The legendary story of a shipwreck on a desert island. Vanity Fair by William Makepeace Thackeray: The story of a young woman''s spectacular rise and fall as she gambles, manipulates and seduces her way through high society and the Napoleonic wars. The Hound of the Baskervilles by Arthur Conan Doyle: Sherlock Holmes'' most famous case as he uncovers the truth behind the terrifying legend of a supernatural hound which preys upon the cursed Baskerville family.

"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)

Focusing on a richly significant time in our recent past, Sebastian Faulks, the bestselling author of Birdsong and Charlotte Gray, has written his first novel set in America. The year is 1960—a fascinating moment of transition in our country, when the comfortable Eisenhower years were drawing to a close and the ruthlessly competitive Nixon/Kennedy presidential campaign signaled the beginning of a starkly different decade. Mary van der Linden has recently moved from London to Washington, D.C., with her two children and her loving, admired husband, Charlie, who is posted to the British Embassy. Nearly forty, Mary has spent a lifetime as a loyal daughter, wife and mother. But in this year of so much change, she feels compelled to break away from her familiar world and is drawn to the freedom of New York City, which is effervescent with parties, jazz, three- martini lunches, girls in their summer dresses and men in their Sinatra hats and big ties. Greenwich Village is still charmingly bohemian, and Miles Davis’s hit tune “On Green Dolphin Street” is playing everywhere. Mary finds a hotel room in New York and then finds a lover, while back in Washington her husband drinks to forget the demands of his job, the absence of his wife and the Cold War paranoia that has overtaken the capital. Faulks breaks new ground with this novel: It is a love story, not a war story, and it is set in America rather than France. Yet readers of his two previous bestselling novels will recognize the close focus of the historical setting, the unforgettable characters and the gathering emotional power of the narrative. On Green Dolphin Street is a dramatic, tremendously moving novel that is certain to extend the American audience for this prodigiously talented author’s work.

"A new Jeeves and Wooster novel"--Jacket.

Five people, separated by place and time, risk their bodies and hearts in search of connection in this novel that explores love, loss, and what makes us human.

The events of Pietro Russell''s life are told in 26 chapters. From A-Z, each chapter is set in a different place and reveals a fragment of his story. As his memories flicker back and forth through time in his search for a resolution to the conflicts of his life, his story gradually unfolds.

Sixteen-year-old Jacques Rebière is living a humble life in rural France, studying butterflies and frogs by candlelight in his bedroom. Across the Channel, in England, the playful Thomas Midwinter, also sixteen, is enjoying a life of ease-and is resigned to follow his father''s wishes and pursue a career in medicine. A fateful seaside meeting four years later sets the two young men on a profound course of friendship and discovery; they will become pioneers in the burgeoning field of psychiatry. But when a female patient at the doctors'' Austrian sanatorium becomes dangerously ill, the two men''s conflicting diagnosis threatens to divide them--and to undermine all their professional achievements. From the bestselling author of Birdsong comes this masterful novel that ventures to answer challenging questions of consciousness and science, and what it means to be human. From the Trade Paperback edition.

A dispatch from the underground world of Birdsong, a story of love and World War I. In a stagnant war of trenches and barbed wire, there is one final desperate front: underground. Jack Firebrace is part of an elite group of British tunnellers, miners by profession, without the military training of infantry but facing unfathomable dangers just the same, forty-five feet underground with several hundred thousand tons of France above their heads. Birdsong, published to international critical and popular acclaim, has become the canonical novel of romance and devastating violence in World War I. In this selection, we are introduced to Jack Firebrace, one of the novel’s central characters, and are given an unforgettable portrait of the lives of soldiers in an unimaginable position. An eBook short.

''Genuinely thought-provoking'' THE TIMES''Extraordinary'' WILLIAM BOYD ''Faulks is an enviably graceful and economical writer'' GUARDIANA CHILD WILL BE BORN WHO WILL CHANGE EVERYTHINGTech billionaire Lukas Parn has an ambitious plan. Behind the doors of the IVF clinic in his London institute, a daring switch is mad[Bokinfo].

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.

In this unique and compelling anthology, Sebastian Faulks and Jorg Hensgen have collected the best fiction about war in the twentieth century. Ranging from the First World War to the Gulf War, these stories depict a soldier''s experience from call-up, battle and comradeship, to leave, hospital and trauma in later life. Truly international in scope, this anthology includes stories by Erich Maria Remarque and Pat Barker, Isaac Babel and Ernest Hemingway, Heinrich Boll and Norman Mailer, JG Ballard and Tim O''Brien, Julian Barnes and Louis de Bernieres. Together they form a powerful and moving evocation of the horrors of war.

A collection of clever, funny and surprising parodies, pastiches and air-shots inspired by ''The Write Stuff'' on Radio 4. Philip Larkin''s ''Lines in Celebration of the Queen Mother''s 115th Birthday'', first banned, then cut by the BBC, appear here in their entirety for the first time.

‘A wonderful portrait of an age, and of a writer’ RORY STEWART ‘Utterly fascinating’ DAVID KYNASTON ‘As charming and funny in schoolboy episodes as he is thought-provoking in the darker environs of mental health, Sebastian Faulks is always resonant, civilised and sane’ MARK KNOPFLER *** In Fires Which Burned Brightly, Faulks, a reluctant memoirist, offers readers a series of detailed snapshots from a life in progress. They include a post-war rural childhood – ‘cold mutton and wet washing on a rack over the range’ – the booze-sodden heyday of Fleet Street and a career as one of the country’s most acclaimed novelists. There are not one, but two daring escapes from boarding school; the delirium of a jetlagged American book tour; the writing of Birdsong in his brother’s house in 1992; and memorable trips across the channel to France. Politics, psychiatry and frustrated ventures into the world of entertainment are analysed with patience and rueful humour. The book is driven by a desire ‘to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time.’ It ends with a tribute to Faulks’s parents and a sense of how his own generation was shaped by the disruptive power of war and its aftermath. Sharply perceptive and alive with a generous wit, Fires Which Burned Brightly is a work of subtle yet profound intelligence and warmth. PRAISE FOR SEBASTIAN FAULKS ''Faulks writes with great emotional authority'' SUNDAY TIMES ''A prodigiously talented writer'' NEW YORK TIMES ''Faulks is beyond doubt a master'' FINANCIAL TIMES ''The most impressive novelist of his generation'' SUNDAY TELEGRAPH

Londra, o săptămână înainte de Crăciun, 2007. Șapte zile, șapte personaje, de fapt, șapte vieți care se intersectează mai mult sau mai puțin, în atmosfera societății londoneze contemporane: un manager de fonduri speculative aflat în căutarea celei mai răsunătoare tranzacții a vieții sale, un jucător de fotbal profesionist recent sosit din Polonia, un tânăr avocat cu prea puține cazuri și prea mult timp pentru speculații teoretice, un student absorbit de teoriile islamiste, un autor de recenzii literare, un elev dependent de canabis și de reality-show-uri, și un conductor de metrou – o tânără al cărei traseu unește toate aceste vieți și multe altele într-un circuit zilnic. Ițele și tiparele complexe ale vieții urbane în lumea de astăzi se împletesc îndrăzneț. Resorturile actualei crize economice, manifestările fundamentalismului religios, prăpastia dintre generații, efectele dezumanizante ale erei electronice, dar și relațiile interumane, pigmentate cu una sau două povești de dragoste, sunt doar câteva dintre temele abordate cu un umor fin, dar acid. Adevărul stă scris în fața lor cu litere de-o șchioapă, și totuși, personajele refuză să-l vadă, continuând să-și joace rolurile mai departe, ca și când ziua de mâine ar fi doar un vis. „Secolul al nouăsprezecelea ne-a dat Bâlciul deșertăciunilor al lui Thackeray și Prietenul nostru comun al lui Dickens... Secolul douăzeci și unu ne oferă romanul lui Sebastian Faulks, O săptămână în decembrie.“ – The Sunday Times „Faulks este, fără îndoială, un veritabil maestru.“ – Financial Times