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Author

Sebastian Faulks

1953

14 fiction · 2 non-fiction

Sebastian Faulks writes historical and literary fiction often centred on memory, war, love and the long emotional consequences of violence.

Sebastian Faulks was born in Donnington, Berkshire, in 1953 and studied English at the University of Cambridge. He worked as a teacher and then as a journalist, holding roles in newspapers and literary journalism before turning increasingly to fiction. His early novels developed an interest in memory, love and the ways private experience is altered by public catastrophe.

Faulks is best known historically for the loose French trilogy comprising The Girl at the Lion d’Or, Birdsong and Charlotte Gray. Birdsong moves between a pre-war love affair and the Western Front, giving particular attention to tunnelling, industrialised violence and the difficulty of communicating trauma across generations. Charlotte Gray examines resistance, occupation and collaboration in wartime France. Other novels, including Human Traces and Paris Echo, engage with psychiatry, memory and contested national histories. Faulks’s historical fiction is less concerned with military overview than with the psychological residue of war. It is especially suited to readers interested in the First World War, occupied France and the persistence of historical trauma within later family life.

Periods and events

Auschwitz-Birkenau1940–1945 Battle of Britain1940 CE Battle of the Somme1916 CE Early Cold War Espionage1945–1965 CE German Occupation of France1940–1944 Holocaust1933–1945 CE Interwar Period1918–1939 CE Italian Campaign of World War II1943–1945 Post-war Britain1945–1963 CE Pre-War Europe1900–1914 CE Rise of Fascism1919–1939 CE Second Red Scare and McCarthyism1947–1957 CE Special Operations Executive in France1940–1945 Victorian London1837–1901 CE Western Front1914–1918 CE

Historical fiction

Historical fiction series by Sebastian Faulks (2 series)

French Trilogy in Order

by Sebastian Faulks 3 books 4.1(117,646)

The French Trilogy is a loose sequence of three novels set in France across the first half of the twentieth century. The Girl at the Lion d’Or explores private love and political unease in 1936; Birdsong moves between pre-war Amiens and the Western Front of the First World…

Austrian Trilogy in Order

by Sebastian Faulks 2 books 4.0(6,412)

The Austrian Trilogy is an ongoing sequence about psychiatry, consciousness and the upheavals of Central Europe. Human Traces begins in the 1870s as two doctors pursue competing explanations of mental illness and establish the Schloss Seeblick clinic in Austria. Snow Country returns to that setting before and after…

Historical fiction

Standalone historical fiction by Sebastian Faulks (9 books)

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Non-fiction

Non-fiction by Sebastian Faulks (2 books)

Reference works, biographies and other non-fiction are kept separate from the historical fiction above.

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Literary wartime historical fiction in the Holocaust and Special Operations Executive in France