positive reviews from Today, The Guardian, The Observer, The Daily Mail, The Mail on Sunday, The Sunday Express, The Sunday Telegraph, The Times Literary Supplement, The Spectator and The Scotsman. American and other international press reviews were similarly positive. The novel's popular reception was similarly positive. Birdsong came 13th in a 2003 BBC survey called the Big Read, which aimed to find Britain's favourite book. It received an "Also Mentioned" credit in The Observer 2005 poll of critics and writers to find the "Best British book of the last 25 years" (1980–2005). Birdsong was listed in The Telegraph as one of the most consistently high selling books of 1998–2008, continuously in the top 5,000 sales figures. Reviews of the novel often focus on the fluid reading experience as well as the novel's effective treatment of "'real' people" within the trauma of war. Gorra describes the novel as mostly a strong WWI novel, characterising it as "superb" with prose that is "spare and precise". The review published in Kirkus Reviews was glowing: "Once more, Faulks shows his unparalleled strengths as a writer of plain human life and high, high compassion. A wonderful book, ringing with truth." Consistently one of the greatest critiques of the novel concerns its 1970s plot-line. 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". 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. 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". The novel has been favourably compared to other World War I and II novels, including All Quiet on the Western Front, The Young Lions and War and Remembrance. Gorra described the novel as even more original than Barker's The Ghost Road and the rest of her Regeneration Trilogy. Kate Saunders, reviewing Birdsong for The Sunday Times, praised the novel and described it as "without the political cynicism that colours more modern treatments of this catastrophe". Reviewers have also compared the novel to other literary works; for example, for one critic, the lead up to the Somme was as persuasive as the "scene in Henry V