A short life of the author
Sebastian Charles Faulks (b. 1953) was born on 20 April 1953 in Donnington, Berkshire, England. He was educated at Wellington College and Emmanuel College, Cambridge, where he read English. He worked as a journalist — including stints as literary editor of the Independent and deputy editor of the Independent on Sunday — before turning to fiction full-time.
Life and Career
The Girl at the Lion d’Or (1989) — set in 1930s France — was his first critical success. Birdsong (1993) — a novel that alternates between the trenches of the Western Front in 1916–1918 and a modern-day woman researching her grandfather’s war experience — was the breakthrough. Its depiction of the Battle of the Somme and the tunnelling operations beneath no man’s land is among the most vivid and harrowing war writing in English. The novel has sold over 3 million copies and was adapted as a BBC television film (2012).
Charlotte Gray (1998) — about a young Scottish woman who joins the French Resistance — completed the French trilogy. On Green Dolphin Street (2001) — set in 1960s Washington and New York — was a departure into American settings.
Human Traces (2005) — about two nineteenth-century psychiatrists and the origins of consciousness — was his most intellectually ambitious novel. Engleby (2007) — about an unreliable narrator who may have committed murder — was a dark psychological study. A Week in December (2009) — a state-of-the-nation novel set during the 2008 financial crisis — was his most commercially successful post-Birdsong work.
Faulks was also commissioned to write a James Bond novel, Devil May Care (2008), and a P.G. Wodehouse novel, Jeeves and the Wedding Bells (2013).
Major Works and Themes
Faulks writes about the aftermath of catastrophe — how individuals and societies are shaped by war, trauma, and loss. His prose is elegant and accessible; his research is exhaustive; his emotional register is sincere without being sentimental.
Key Works
- Birdsong (1993)
- Charlotte Gray (1998)
- Human Traces (2005)
- Engleby (2007)
Collecting Faulks
Birdsong (1993, Hutchinson) — the UK first — brings $100–$300.
Charlotte Gray (1998, Hutchinson) brings $20–$60. Faulks signs at UK events.
Bibliography
| Title | Year | Publisher | Language |
|---|---|---|---|
| Birdsong Faulks's World War I novel — alternating between a soldier's experience in the tunnels beneath the Western Front and his granddaughter's attempt decades later to understand what he endured — combining an intense pre-war love affair in Amiens with the most viscerally horrifying depictions of trench warfare in English literature, producing a bestseller that became the most widely read British novel about the Great War since the war itself. | 1993 | Hutchinson | English |
| Charlotte Gray The third novel in Faulks's French trilogy — a young Scottish woman joins the SOE in 1943, parachuting into occupied France ostensibly to find her missing RAF lover but ultimately confronting the Vichy deportation of Jewish children — exploring complicity, memory, and the gap between private motive (love) and public action (resistance) in a war where individual heroism cannot prevent systematic evil. | 1998 | Hutchinson | English |
| Human Traces Faulks's most intellectually ambitious novel — following two psychiatrists from the 1870s to World War I as they attempt to understand madness — one believing mental illness is organic (brain disease), the other that it is psychological (the price of consciousness itself) — combining intellectual history, medical science, and personal drama to argue that schizophrenia may be an evolutionary consequence of the same cognitive capacity that produces language and self-awareness. | 2005 | Hutchinson | English |
| On Green Dolphin Street Set in 1960 New York and Washington — a British diplomat's wife begins an affair with an American journalist during the Kennedy-Nixon election — exploring the collision between English emotional restraint and American openness against the backdrop of the last moment before the Sixties transformed everything, written with the controlled lyricism of Faulks's best work. | 2001 | Hutchinson | English |
| The Girl at the Lion d'Or The first novel in Faulks's French trilogy — set in 1930s France during the social upheavals of the Popular Front — a young woman arrives at a provincial hotel fleeing a shameful past and falls into an affair with a married lawyer, combining romantic fiction with political history in a novel of elegant restraint that established Faulks's characteristic territory: English sensibility applied to French landscape. | 1989 | Hutchinson | English |