Where to Start with Sebastian Faulks: A Reading Guide
Where to start with Sebastian Faulks — whether to begin with Birdsong, Charlotte Gray, or A Week in December. A complete reading guide to his best novels.
Sebastian Faulks (born 1953) is the British novelist who became one of the most celebrated and most widely read authors of his generation with Birdsong (1993), his novel of the First World War that sold millions of copies and was ranked in a 2003 BBC poll as one of the greatest novels of all time. His fiction is characterised by meticulous historical research, emotional directness, and a willingness to engage with the experience of war — particularly the First and Second World Wars in France — with a gravity that distinguishes him from lighter historical novelists. His later fiction (A Week in December, Engleby, A Possible Life) has explored contemporary Britain and the nature of consciousness, with varying but always serious ambitions.
Where to Start: Birdsong (1993)
The essential Faulks — and one of the most powerful British novels of the twentieth century. Stephen Wraysford, a young Englishman sent to work in a textile factory in Amiens in 1910, falls passionately in love with Isabelle Azaire, his employer’s wife. Their affair is intense and ends badly. Six years later, Stephen is an officer in the British Expeditionary Force at the Somme, commanding men in the tunnels dug beneath No Man’s Land to undermine the German positions — one of the most physically dangerous and psychologically devastating roles in the war.
The novel moves between the love story and the war with complete confidence; the war sections draw on Faulks’s extensive research into the experience of the Western Front and render the industrialised slaughter with a specificity and an emotional weight that make them among the most powerful passages in modern fiction. The parallel structure of Elizabeth’s 1978 search for her grandfather’s story adds a layer of retrospective grief. His most essential work.
Charlotte Gray (1998)
Faulks’s most structurally ambitious novel — set in Vichy France in 1942, where Charlotte Gray travels south from Scotland to search for her missing RAF boyfriend and finds herself drawn into a French village’s attempts to survive the German occupation and the Vichy collaborationist government. The novel follows Charlotte’s gradual involvement with the Resistance and the community’s responses to occupation — the collaborators, the resisters, the ordinary people trying not to be noticed — as well as the deportation of the village’s Jewish families.
Faulks researches the mechanics of Vichy France with the same precision he brought to the Somme; the result is a novel that illuminates both individual moral choice and the collective failure of a society under pressure. His most morally complex novel.
A Week in December (2009)
Faulks’s most contemporary and most explicitly satirical novel — set over one week in December 2007 in London, following seven characters whose lives intersect: a hedge fund manager preparing to execute a complex financial fraud; a young Muslim man being radicalised; a professional football player; a book reviewer; a senator; a schizophrenic young man; and various others in the overlapping worlds of London finance, media, and politics.
The novel is a state-of-the-nation novel in the tradition of Thackeray and Dickens — satirical, plotted to bring characters into collision, and aimed at diagnosing the moral failures of pre-crash Britain. His most immediately topical work and the one that shows the widest range of his ambitions.
Reading Sebastian Faulks
Faulks’s fiction is distinguished by the seriousness with which it treats its historical subjects — the industrialised slaughter of the First World War, the moral catastrophe of Vichy France, the financial recklessness of pre-crash London — and by the emotional directness with which it renders individual experience within those subjects. He is a popular novelist with literary ambitions, and the combination has made him one of the most widely read serious British novelists of his generation. Begin with Birdsong for the most essential and the most powerful; read Charlotte Gray for the most fully realised and the most morally complex.
Frequently Asked Questions
Where should I start with Sebastian Faulks?
Birdsong (1993) is the essential starting point — one of the most powerful and most widely read British novels about the First World War. Set partly in Amiens in 1910 before the war and partly in the trenches of the Somme during it, the novel follows the young Englishman Stephen Wraysford through a passionate affair and then through the mud and slaughter of the Western Front. It is Faulks's most emotionally intense and most acclaimed novel, and the one that made his reputation. Charlotte Gray is the best alternative for readers who want Faulks in a wartime France setting but with a female protagonist and a more novelistic structure.
What is Birdsong about?
Birdsong (1993) is set in three time periods: 1910 Amiens, where the young Stephen Wraysford falls passionately in love with Isabelle Azaire, the wife of a textile manufacturer; 1916–1918, where Stephen serves as an officer in the British Army at the Somme and witnesses the catastrophic losses of the First World War; and 1978, where Stephen's granddaughter Elizabeth tries to piece together his story from his encrypted diaries. The novel is both a love story and a war novel; Faulks researches the tunnelling operations under No Man's Land with extraordinary specificity, and the battle sequences are among the most powerful in modern fiction.
What is Charlotte Gray about?
Charlotte Gray (1998) is set in Vichy France in 1942, following Charlotte Gray, a young Scotswoman who travels to the south of France, ostensibly to search for her missing RAF boyfriend Levade but increasingly drawn into the resistance and the daily reality of life under the German occupation. The novel follows parallel narratives — Charlotte's experience and the local community's response to collaboration, denunciation, and the deportation of Jewish families — and asks what individual courage and moral choice look like in a society that has largely capitulated. More female-centred than Birdsong and equally powerful.
Are Faulks's French novels connected?
Birdsong, Charlotte Gray, and The Girl at the Lion d'Or (1989, not in this collection) are sometimes referred to as Faulks's 'French trilogy' — they are all set in France, all deal with the impact of war on French society and Anglo-French relationships, and all share a preoccupation with memory, loss, and the difficulty of recovering from historical catastrophe. They are not directly connected by plot or characters, however, and can be read in any order. Birdsong and Charlotte Gray stand fully alone; reading them as a pair deepens the sense of France as a recurring subject of Faulks's historical imagination.
