Sebastian Faulks

1953

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

Pre-War Europe World War I Western Front Battle of the Somme Interwar Period Rise of Fascism World War II Holocaust French Resistance Special Operations Executive in France German Occupation of France Victorian Era Victorian London Italian Campaign of World War II

Series

Series by Sebastian Faulks (2 series)

French Trilogy in Order

by Sebastian Faulks 3 books 4.1

The French Trilogy is a loose sequence of novels set in France across the first half of the twentieth century. The books are not a continuous plot series with the same central characters; they are connected by place, emotional aftermath and the pressure of European history on private…

Girl at the Lion d’Or

3.6

Birdsong

4.1

Charlotte Gray

3.9

Austrian Trilogy in Order

by Sebastian Faulks 2 books 3.9

The Austrian Trilogy follows Sebastian Faulks’s recurring interest in the mind, memory and European fracture through stories centred on Austria and Central Europe. Human Traces examines late nineteenth-century psychiatry and the ambition to understand mental illness, while Snow Country returns to the same wider world after the First…