My grandfather (age sixteen) fought in the Argonne forrest and was gassed in WW 1. He was in the trenches and as I read I pictured him there among the rats, the mud, the awfulness of war. Perhaps this connection made the book not just another book about a war, but one that held memories for me of a beloved man who was just a kid fighting a onerous war.

His latest novel titled The Seventh Son was published in September 2023. Despite some reservations, Melissa Katsoulis praised the book in The Times and stated that there are "some high ideas at work here and, as with the best dystopian fictions, all the crazy future science stuff feels scary precisely because it’s close to happening already." [27] Adaptations of novels [ edit ]with Hope Wolf (eds). A Broken World: Letters, Diaries and Memories of the Great War Hutchinson, London 2014, ISBN 978-0-09-195422-2 The force that drove through him could not be stopped. The part of his mind that remained calm accepted this; if the necessity could not be denied, then the question was only whether it could be achieved with her consent." This is a powerful novel, and certainly not for the faint hearted. I read this for my local book club and I can imagine when we meet in February this book is going to make for great discussion.

a b c Nikkhah, Roya (23 May 2010). "Sebastian Faulks novel Birdsong to be made into West End play". The Daily Telegraph. Archived from the original on 9 October 2016 . Retrieved 30 August 2016. The title is evocative. I found several reasons to entitle the book this way, not least Stephen's declaration regarding his feelings about birds and the reasons behind those feelings. When you read the book, keep the title in your mind. Seeking the meaning adds an extra dimension to your reading. Norwegian novelist Jacobsen folds a quietly powerful coming-of-age story into a rendition of daily life on one of Norway’s rural islands a hundred years ago in a novel that was shortlisted for the 2017 Man Booker International Prize. Consistently one of the greatest critiques of the novel concerns its 1970s plot-line. [17] For example, Gorra found that the addition of a parallel narrative "[ran] into problems"—especially concerning Elizabeth Benson, whom he "stopped believing in [as a] character". [9] Unlike other reviewers, the critic Sarah Belo did not question the historical investigation plot, but the depiction of Elizabeth's experience as a 1970s woman in England. [17] On the other hand, almost all of the reviewers describe the novel's war sections as excellently written; for example, the review in the Los Angeles Times called the sections "so powerful as to be almost unbearable". [17] I believe there are novels that affect you long after you have closed the book and I do believe that this is one of them. It was fated for me to read this book (at least I believe it to be so) since as I walked into the library, this book was propped up on the shelf seeming to send a message saying take me home. I listened and am ever so grateful I did take this powerful book home and to heart.This book rips you apart, scares you to death, rolls you in passionate, sensual love, one minute has you giggling and then later pondering the essence of life and death and fear. The book is an emotional roller coaster. And you will learn what it was really like to fight in the first world war. You can swallow the horror because it is balanced by humor and love and passion and even hope and happiness. I'm sure that I'm not the only English teacher here …" began one questioner. We could not but be aware that this is a book that has entered the bloodstream of A-level studies. One reader, speaking of how the character of Isabelle seemed to repel the reader's sympathy in the novel's first section ("I have to agree," added another member of the audience), referred to her own response and that of "some of my students". A teacher asked what Faulks had thought about suddenly finding himself on an examination syllabus, with classrooms of students now "second-guessing" what he had been doing when he was planning his novel. "It's wonderful," he answered, adding that he thought it was "quite an easy book to teach – because it's a book in primary colours. You can see how it is put together." Faulks' writing is truly outstanding, the fear and hopelessness felt by the men is made vivid and terrifyingly portrayed. An American member of the audience wondered what the research for and writing of the book had told its author about Englishness. Faulks did not think his novel was a national story, but that the history it reimagined was "part of who we are". The nature of the war meant that its effects were appallingly concentrated. He spoke of being sent a photograph of a Rosslyn Park rugby team from 1913, every one of whose 15 members was killed. The recruitment of men from particular areas made the war "part of the landscape of Britain". However, the crowning achievement of Birdsong is its unflinching depiction of war. The earsplitting cacophony of the artillery, the claustrophobia of the tunnels, the never-ending mud, the smell of sweat and shit, the horror of seeing a head explode in front of your eyes. The heartbreaking letters sent home from the Somme, its writers knowing that they were almost certainly going to die in the coming hours. The bodies in pieces, pale and rotting in no man's land. The senseless brutality of it all, summed up by a roll call after the battle, ringing with unanswered names: "Names came pattering into the dusk, bodying out the places of their forebears, the villages and towns where the telegrams would be delivered, the houses where the blinds would be drawn, where low moans would come in the afternoon behind closed doors; and the places that had borne them, which would be like nunneries, like dead towns without their life or purpose, without young men at the factories or in the fields, with no husbands for the women, no deep sound of voices in the inns, with the children who would have been born, who would have grown and worked or painted, even governed, left ungenerated in their fathers' shattered flesh that lay in stinking shellholes in the beet crop soil, leaving their homes to put up only granite slabs in place of living flesh, on whose inhuman surface the moss and lichen would cast their crawling green indifference."

The final section is two generations later, Elizabeth is researching her family history, looking into her ancestors, in particular her grandfather, who left behind notebooks of his experiences. Bob – Irene's husband. He offers to translate the code used in Stephen Wraysford's war diaries for Elizabeth.

At the end of the first half, there is original footage of soldiers waiting to go over their trenches, into the brave and bloody battle of the Somme. It provides a potent moment of dramatic pause, but what follows is an extended narration by Faulks, set against the image of a soldier walking into the field, along with images of commemorative lists of the dead and gravestones. It is unclear whether this is part of the drama or an official pause from it, and while the documentary footage and narration are powerful, they combine oddly to push us out of the story. a mainstream movie like manipulation of the reader to underline the little regard for life that war has, where key supporting characters' deaths are almost just footnotes, but a footnote with a sniper's bullet or machine gun fire. Birdsong is a historical drama about WWI. Whenever I read about the tragedies of war I realize that had I been a soldier I never would have mentally recovered from the atrocities witnessed. Stephen, the main character, does recover but at a great cost. In both 2013 and 2014, Faulks indicated that a feature film adaptation was in development. The screenplay is by Rupert Wyatt, and the film is expected to star Nicholas Hoult. [21] [22]

Stephen has a chance encounter with Jeanne, Isabelle's sister, while on leave in Amiens. During this encounter, Stephen persuades her to allow him to meet with Isabelle. He meets her but finds her face disfigured by a shell with scarring from the injury. Stephen discovers that Isabelle is now in a relationship with Max, a German soldier. The contemporary historian Simon Wessley describes the novel, alongside Barker's Regeneration, as an exemplar of contemporary fiction which uses the experience of the World War I trenches to examine more contemporary understandings of PTSD. [14] De Groot argues that this reinvestigation of a traumatic history mirrors a growing interest among both literary authors and historians in trauma as a thematic subject. [8]

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Faulks has created a poignant and epic love story, set in the absolute atrocities of the first world war. The scenes in the trenches are truly horrific and they tell the reader the very depths of human despair. I had to pause after a couple of these such scenes, just to let what I had just read, sink in. Love and war always seem to go together in fiction. In ancient literature, it is love that makes men fight; in unheroic ages, the relationship is less direct. Faulks's unromantic choice is to have his protagonist forget the woman he loved once he is in the trenches. The novel forgets her too: in its pre-war first section, some passages are narrated from her point of view, but once she and Stephen have separated, she is gone. It is rather that the sensual detail of their brief time as lovers is horrifically parodied by Stephen's physical life as a soldier.