Sebastian Faulks was born in April 1953. Before becoming a full-time writer in 1991, he worked as a journalist. Sebastian Faulks''s books include A Possible Life, Human Traces, On Green Dolphin Street, Engleby, Birdsong, A Week in December and Where My Heart Used to Beat.
''A fine and profoundly intelligent novel, written by an author who balances big ideas with human emotion. Wistful, yearning and wise'' ELIZABETH DAY ''Faulks''s most poignant love story yet'' ANTONY BEEVOR, author of Stalingrad _____________________ 1914: Young Anton Heideck has arrived in Vienna, eager to make his name as a journalist. While working part-time as a private tutor, he encounters Delphine, a woman who mixes startling candour with deep reserve. Entranced by the light of first love, Anton feels himself blessed. Until his country declares war on hers. 1927: For Lena, life with a drunken mother in a small town has been impoverished and cold. She is convinced she can amount to nothing until a young lawyer, Rudolf Plischke, spirits her away to Vienna. But the capital proves unforgiving. Lena leaves her metropolitan dream behind to take a menial job at the snow-bound sanatorium, the Schloss Seeblick. 1933: Still struggling to come terms with the loss of so many friends on the Eastern Front, Anton, now an established writer, is commissioned by a magazine to visit the mysterious Schloss Seeblick. In this place of healing, on the banks of a silvery lake, where the depths of human suffering and the chances of redemption are explored, two people will see each other as if for the first time. _____________________ Sweeping across Europe as it recovers from one war and hides its face from the coming of another, SNOW COUNTRY is a landmark novel of exquisite yearnings, dreams of youth and the sanctity of hope. In elegant, shimmering prose, Sebastian Faulks has produced a work of timeless resonance. _____________________ ''Overpowering and beautiful ... Ambitious, outrageous, poignant, sleep-disturbing'' SIMON SCHAMA on Birdsong
Paris Echo follows Hannah, a 31-year-old American post-doctoral researcher looking into the lives of women during the German Occupation of Paris; and Tariq, a 19-year-old boy who has run away from his home in Morocco, searching for sex and adventure. As both characters fight to preserve their integrity and their sanity, they find their future shaped by the ghosts of the Paris Metro.
A novel of overwhelming emotional power, Birdsong is a story of love, death, sex and survival. Stephen Wraysford, a young Englishman, arrives in Amiens in northern France in 1910 to stay with the Azaire family, and falls in love with unhappily married Isabelle.
Sixteen-year-old Jacques Rebiere is living a humble life in rural France, studying butterflies and frogs by candlelight in his bedroom. Across the Channel, in England, the playful Thomas Midwinter, also sixteen, is enjoying a life of ease-and is resigned to follow his father's wishes and pursue a career in medicine. A fateful seaside meeting four years later sets the two young men on a profound course of friendship and discovery; they will become pioneers in the burgeoning field of psychiatry. But when a female patient at the doctors' Austrian sanatorium becomes dangerously ill, the two men's conflicting diagnosis threatens to divide them--and to undermine all their professional achievements. From the bestselling author of Birdsong comes this masterful novel that ventures to answer challenging questions of consciousness and science, and what it means to be human.
Published to international critical and popular acclaim, this intensely romantic yet stunningly realistic novel spans three generations and the unimaginable gulf between the First World War and the present. As the young Englishman Stephen Wraysford passes through a tempestuous love affair with Isabelle Azaire in France and enters the dark, surreal world beneath the trenches of No Man's Land, Sebastian Faulks creates a world of fiction that is as tragic as A Farewell to Arms and as sensuous as The English Patient . Crafted from the ruins of war and the indestructibility of love, Birdsong is a novel that will be read and marveled at for years to come.
Deauville, 1880. Jacques et Thomas, deux étudiants liés par une fascination commune pour le fonctionnement du cerveau humain, se jurent de révolutionner ensemble la médecine et de soigner le frère de Jacques, atteint d'un mal étrange qui a contraint sa famille à l'enfermer.
Les deux amis poursuivent leurs études, l'un à Paris sous l'égide du grand Charcot, l'autre en Angleterre dans un asile où les fous sont parqués comme du bétail, et parviennent finalement à créer dans les Alpes l'institution de leurs rêves. Au fil des années, ils empruntent des routes divergentes.
Jacques adhère à la psychanalyse naissante, risquant même par son obstination la vie d'une patiente, alors que Thomas recherche les causes des maladies mentales dans la chaîne de l'Évolution.
À travers cette grande épopée initiatique, Sebastian Faulks fait revivre un siècle en pleine mutation, et nous plonge dans ses débats scientifiques et philosophiques les plus fascinants.
«Dans L'Empreinte de l'homme, Faulks se révèle un écrivain digne des grands maîtres européens : Thomas Mann, Balzac, Stendhal.» The Times
Lorsque débute Le Diable l'emporte, c'est la guerre froide. Sebastian Faulks nous entraîne sans temps mort dans l'univers des meilleurs James Bond et réunit tous les ingrédients des aventures du plus sexy et du plus efficace des agents secrets : glamour, suspense et action.
A beautifully controlled and powerful story of love and conscience, will and desire which begins when a mysterious young girl arrives to take up the post at the seedy Hotel du Lion D'Or in a small French town in the mid 1930s.
Washington, 1960.
L'Amérique vit dans l'illusion d'un avenir meilleur tandis que les jeunes sénateurs Nixon et Kennedy se livrent à une lutte sans merci. Non loin de la Maison-Blanche, Mary Van der Linden, mère comblée et épouse d'un diplomate britannique, mène une existence paisible, partagée entre les soirées à l'ambassade et les week-ends en voilier. Mais sous ces apparences sereines ressurgissent des douleurs enfouies.
Quelles peurs secrètes semblent condamner Charlie Van der Linden à sombrer dans un alcoolisme qui n'a plus rien de mondain ? Quelle issue trouveront les combats de Mary contre des fantômes du passé et des menaces bien présentes ? Quel secours pourra lui apporter Frank Renzo, journaliste new-yorkais qui tente de se réconcilier avec la vie ? Sensuel comme une ballade de Miles Davis, porté par une écriture ciselée et un immense pouvoir d'évocation, Les Désenchantés trace le portrait d'une époque belle et meurtrie, riche des illusions et des blessures de personnages à l'aube de leur destin.
«Je m'appelle Mike Engleby et je suis inscrit en deuxième année dans une vénérable université.» C'est par cette brève présentation que l'on découvre la voix la plus fascinante et la plus singulière d'une longue lignée de narrateurs inquiétants. Malgré son intelligence, quelque chose dérange chez l'étrange et solitaire Engleby. Dès le moment où Jennifer Arkland, l'étudiante pour laquelle il nourrissait une véritable obsession, disparaît, une question ne cesse de se poser:est-il responsable? Le nouveau roman de Sebastian Faulks est une plongée envoûtante dans l'univers feutré de l'éducation anglaise, des public schools aux universités d'élite, dont Engleby semble la troublante incarnation.
On a small island off the south coast of France, Robert Hendricks, an English doctor who has seen the best and the worst the twentieth century had to offer, is forced to confront the events that made up his life. His host, and antagonist, is Alexander Pereira, a man whose time is running out, but who seems to know more about his guest than Hendricks himself does. The search for sanity takes us through the war in Italy in 1944, a passionate love that seems to hold out hope, the great days of idealistic work in the 1960s and finally - unforgettably - back into the trenches of the Western Front. The recurring themes of Sebastian Faulks''s fiction are brought together with a new stylistic brilliance as the novel casts a long, baleful light over the century we have left behind but may never fully understand. Daring, ambitious and in the end profoundly moving, this is Faulks''s most remarkable book yet.
