Sebastian Faulks is an English author of fiction. Born in 1953, he grew up in Newbury. He was the son of a repertory actress and a judge.
Faulks went to Wellington College and studied in Cambridge at Emmanuel College, although he did not much enjoy going to either school. He says that Cambridge in the seventies was very male-dominated, and Faulks says that you would have to travel about five miles on your bicycle just to meet a girl. That was how tough it was to be at that school and have any type of social life with girls; although now Faulks is married with children so it clearly worked out all right.
Faulks was the first literary editor for the publication “The Independent”. He became the deputy editor of “The Sunday Independent” later. He was awarded the CBE in 2002. in total. He worked as a journalist for well over a decade until he decided that he would like to become a writer and officially became a writer full-time in 1991.
Sebastian Faulks lives with his wife and their children in London. His first novel was published in 1984. He has written other standalone novels like that, including A Fool’s Alphabet, Human Traces, Engleby, and much more. He has also contributed to the James Bond series by Ian Fleming and the Jeeves & Wooster series created by P.G. Wodehouse.
Sebastian Faulks is also known for having written the French Trilogy. which started in 1989. The first book was followed by the sequel, which was released in 1993. The last book in the series was Charlotte Gray.
The first book is about a young woman who is looking to start over and have a totally new life when she meets a married man that may turn everything around. Birdsong is the second book in the series and is set between the two world wars but covers three generations, flashing between the past and the present.
As a young man is fighting for his life during World War II, he is leaving behind a beautiful romance that he can only dream of going back to and may never get back to again.
Charlotte Gray is the third novel in the series. In this book, it is 1942 and Charlotte Gray is a young Scottish woman. She is going to Occupied France on a dual mission that is to run an errand for an English special forces group and secretly look for her missing in action lover, an English airman, as the townspeople of Lavaurette prepare to meet destiny.
Birdsong was adapted into a television movie miniseries that aired in 2012. The series starred Eddie Redmayne as Stephen, the young soldier going to war, and Clemence Poesy as Isabelle. It was a two-part television drama that was produced by BBC’s Working Title Films and PBS’s Masterpiece. It aired in January of 2012 in the U.K. and April 2012 in the United States. It tells the story in flashbacks and differs from the novel in that it omits a section concerning the seventies and the character Stephen is not scared of birds as he is in the novel.
The Girl at the Lion d’Or is the first book in Faulks’ French Trilogy. Read the book that The Sunday Times called ‘beautifully written’ and ‘extraordinarily moving’. When it comes to historical fiction, you’ll definitely want to pick up this gripping novel that is haunting with its depiction of courage, passion, and loss. This novel is set in France sometimes between the happenings of two world wars.
The main character in this novel is Anne Louvet. It’s a rainy night, and she appears at the Hotel du Lion d’Or. The run-down hotel is located in the village of Javilliers. It is the 1930s and Anne is looking for a new life and a new job that are much different from the ones of the past.Anne finds more than just a new life or a new job as she starts falling for a handsome veteran of the first World War.
As she enters into a bold love affair with him, all the rules are thrown out the window as the married man and the young woman come together without any of the restrictions of societal norms. Can she find her way to a new life through hew new love, or will he abandon her on a whim?
Birdsong is the second novel in the French Trilogy. This novel takes place in the ruins of war with themes of love being indestructible and was published to popular and critical acclaim both in the U.K. and around the globe for Sebastian Faulk’s work!
This novel is both romantic and realistic to the times that it portrays, spanning three generations of people and crossing the gulf between the present and the First World War. The main character in this novel is Stephen Wraysford. He is a young Englishman that has been through a love affair with a young woman named Isabelle in France.
The affair was tempestuous and now he is leaving it all behind for the war. The whole thing is like some terrible nightmare or some strange dream. Now Stephen is going to the trenches of No Man’s Land, called that because it’s likely that no man that goes into it is ever coming back again. Men who go to that area rarely get to go home and live normal lives.
In this dark and intriguing work of fiction, Faulks has made a world that is as tragic as any novel out there. If you enjoyed A Farewell to Arms, Saving Private Ryan, The English Patient, and more, you’ll like this novel. Check out Birdsong to read it for yourself and check out the miniseries that was aired in 2012 to catch the film adaptation based on the novel by Sebastian Faulks.