Sebastian Faulks

Sebastian Faulks is an English novelist and journalist whose historical fiction includes Birdsong, Charlotte Gray, and The Girl at the Lion d’Or. His novels often examine how private lives are shaped by war, memory, and social change.

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Birdsong: A 1993 novel by Sebastian Faulks that follows an Englishman before and during the First World War. Its trench-warfare narrative became Faulks’s most widely recognized historical novel.
Historical novel: A work of fiction set in a past period and shaped by its historical circumstances. This genre frames Faulks’s best-known novels and their use of research.
Jonathan Cape: A British publishing house founded in 1921, known for literary fiction and nonfiction. The publisher issued several of Faulks’s novels, including Birdsong.
Devil May Care: A 2008 James Bond novel by Sebastian Faulks, written to mark the centenary of Ian Fleming’s birth. The commissioned thriller departs from Faulks’s usual historical and literary fiction.
Charlotte Gray: A 1998 novel by Sebastian Faulks about a Scottish woman working with the French Resistance during the Second World War. It extends his wartime fiction from the Western Front to occupied France.
First World War: A global war fought from 1914 to 1918, principally between the Allied and Central Powers. The conflict supplies the battlefield and historical trauma of Birdsong.
Ian Fleming: An English writer who created the fictional spy James Bond. Faulks continued Fleming’s Bond series with the authorized novel Devil May Care.
Human Traces: A 2005 novel by Sebastian Faulks about psychiatry and the development of ideas about mental illness. Its nineteenth-century scientific setting broadens his historical fiction beyond wartime.
The Girl at the Lion d’Or: A 1989 novel by Sebastian Faulks set in France between the world wars. This early novel established France as a recurring setting in his fiction.
French Resistance: The underground movements that opposed German occupation and Vichy authority in France during the Second World War. Its networks and dangers shape the setting of Charlotte Gray.