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Critics' Opinion:
Readers' Opinion:
First Published:
Feb 1996, 402 pages
Paperback:
Apr 1997, 483 pages
Crafted from the ruins of war and the indestructibility of love, Birdsong is a novel that will be read and marveled at for years to come.
Published to international critical and popular acclaim, this intensely romantic yet stunningly realistic novel spans three generations and the unimaginable gulf between the First World War and the present. As the young Englishman Stephen Wraysford passes through a tempestuous love affair with Isabelle Azaire in France and enters the dark, surreal world beneath the trenches of No Man's Land, Sebastian Faulks creates a world of fiction that is as tragic as A Farewell to Arms and as sensuous as The English Patient. Crafted from the ruins of war and the indestructibility of love, Birdsong is a novel that will be read and marveled at for years to come.
FRANCE
1910
Part One
The boulevard du Cange was a broad, quiet street that marked the eastern flank of the city of Amiens. The wagons that rolled in from Lille and Arras to the north drove directly into the tanneries and mills of the Saint Leu quarter without needing to use this rutted, leafy road. The town side of the boulevard backed on to substantial gardens, which were squared off and apportioned with civic precision to the houses they adjoined. On the damp grass were chestnut trees, lilacs, and willows, cultivated to give shade and quietness to their owners. The gardens had a wild, overgrown look and their deep lawns and bursting hedges could conceal small clearings, quiet pools, and areas unvisited even by the inhabitants, where patches of grass and wild flowers lay beneath the branches of overhanging trees.
Behind the gardens the river Somme broke up into small canals that were the picturesque feature of Saint Leu; on the other side of the boulevard these had been ...
Frank Conroy
Birdsong moved me more profoundly than anything I've read in years.... A deeply compassionate, utterly thrilling work by a master of the form.
More books by Sebastian Faulks
If you liked Birdsong, try these:
by Mary-Rose MacColl
Published 2013
A bestselling Australian writer's American debut and a heart-wrenching novel of World War I, painting a portrait of the changing role of women in medicine and the powerful legacy of love.
by A.S. Byatt
Published 2010
A spellbinding novel that spans the Victorian era through the World War I years, and centers around a famous children's book author and the passions, betrayals, and secrets that tear apart the people she loves.
The God of Endings
by Jacqueline Holland
A suspenseful debut that weaves a story of love, history and myth through the eyes of one immortal woman.
Once We Were Home
by Jennifer Rosner
From the author of The Yellow Bird Sings, a novel based on the true stories of children stolen in the wake of World War II.
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