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. 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.

"Beautifully written and--extraordinarily moving."--The Sunday Times (London) From the author of the international bestseller Birdsong, comes a haunting historical novel of passion, loss, and courage set in France between the two world wars. This Vintage Original edition marks its first appearance in the United States. On a rainy night in the 1930s, Anne Louvet appears at the run-down Hotel du Lion d'Or in the village of Janvilliers.  She is seeking a job and a new life, one far removed from the awful injustices of her past. As Anne embarks on a torrential love affair with a married veteran of the Great War, The Girl at the Lion d'Or fashions an unbreakable spell of narrative and atmosphere that evokes French masters from Flaubert to Renoir.       "This moving and profound novel is perfectly constructed, and admirable in its configurations of place and period."--The Times (London) "I would urge those who appreciated--The French Lieutenant's Woman to try this one--. They may well think it superior."--Sunday Telegraph (London)

Bestselling British author Sebastian Faulks reinvents the unreliable narrator with his singular, haunting creation—Mike Engleby. "My name is Mike Engleby, and I'm in my second year at an ancient university." With that brief introduction we meet one of the most mesmerizing, singular voices in a long tradition of disturbing narrators. Despite his obvious intelligence and compelling voice, it is clear that something about solitary, odd Mike is not quite right. When he becomes fixated on a classmate named Jennifer Arkland and she goes missing, we are left with the looming question: Is Mike Engleby involved? As he grows up, finding a job and even a girlfriend in London, Mike only becomes more and more detached from those around him in an almost anti-coming-of-age. His inability to relate to others and his undependable memory (able to recall countless lines of text yet sometimes incapable of summoning up his own experiences from mere days before) lead the reader down an unclear and often darkly humorous path where one is never completely comfortable or confident about what is true. Mike Engleby is a chilling and unforgettable character, and Engleby is a novel that will surprise and beguile Sebastian Faulks' readership.

Robinson Crusoe discovers thousands of ‘half-naked savages’ having it large on Ibiza. James Bond is on a mission, as a 24-hour call-out plumber. ‘The young stable lad is a moody fellow,’ say reviewers of Wuthering Heights in The Good Hotel Guide. Hans Christian Andersen gets into the subprime mortgage racket. Stephen King attempts a love story that doesn’t involve buckets of blood. Robbie Burns cheers on Andy Murray at Wimbledon. And Harry Potter is left high and dry when Ginny kicks him out and keeps the house. Re-mixed and re-imagined, this is literature but not as you know it.

London, the week before Christmas 2007. Over seven wintry days, we follow the lives of seven characters across the city, from a hedge fund manager to a Tube train driver. Above the complex patterns of modern urban life, the writing on the wall appears in letters ten feet high, but the characters refuse to see it . As the gripping climax looms, they are forced, one by one, to awake from their blinkered present to confront the true nature of the world they inhabit.

In this unique and compelling anthology, Sebastian Faulks has collected the best fiction about war in the 20th century. Ranging from the First World War to the Gulf War, these stories depict a soldiers experience from call-ups battle and comradship to leave, hospital and trauma in later life. Truely international in scope, this anthology includes stories by Erich Maria Remarque and Pat Barker, Issac Babel and Ernest Hemingway , Heinrich Boll and Norman Mailer, JG Ballard and Tim OBrian Julian Barnes and Louis de Barnieres. Together they form a powerful and moving evocation of the horors of war.

'Brings the peerless Jeeves and Wooster barrelling back to life' *Daily Mail* A gloriously witty novel from Sebastian Faulks using P.G. Wodehouse’s much-loved characters, Jeeves and Wooster, fully authorised by the Wodehouse estate. ****Bertie Wooster is staying at the stately home of Sir Henry Hackwood in Dorset. He is more than familiar with the country-house set-up: he is a veteran of the cocktail hour and, thanks to Jeeves, his gentleman’s personal gentleman, is never less than immaculately dressed. On this occasion, however, it is Jeeves who is to be seen in the drawing room while Bertie finds himself below stairs – which he doesn’t care for at all. His predicament is, of course, all in the name of love … ‘A masterpiece … a pitch-perfect undertaking’ Spectator ‘Entirely delightful’ Financial Times ‘Delightfully witty, packed with puns’ Sunday Mirror ‘A polished sparkling genuine fake’ Herald

Bond is back. With a vengeance. "Devil May Care" is a masterful continuation of the James Bond legacy-an electrifying new chapter in the life of the most iconic spy of literature and film, written to celebrate the centenary of Ian Fleming's birth on May 28, 1908. An Algerian drug runner is savagely executed in the desolate outskirts of Paris. This seemingly isolated event leads to the recall of Agent 007 from his sabbatical in Rome and his return to the world of intrigue and danger where he is most at home. The head of MI6, M, assigns him to shadow the mysterious Dr. Julius Gorner, a power-crazed pharmaceutical magnate, whose wealth is exceeded only by his greed. Gorner has lately taken a disquieting interest in opiate derivatives, both legal and illegal, and this urgently bears looking into. Bond finds a willing accomplice in the shape of a glamorous Parisian named Scarlett Papava. He will need her help in a life-and-death struggle with his most dangerous adversary yet, as a chain of events threaten to lead to global catastrophe. A British airliner goes missing over Iraq. The thunder of a coming war echoes in the Middle East. And a tide of lethal narcotics threatens to engulf a Great Britain in the throes of the social upheavals of the late sixties. Picking up where Fleming left off, Sebastian Faulks takes Bond back to the height of the Cold War in a story of almost unbearable pace and tension. "Devil May Care" not only captures the very essence of Fleming's original novels but also shows Bond facing dangers with a powerful relevance to our own times.

pistache (pis-tash): a friendly spoof or parody of another's work. [Deriv uncertain. Possibly a cross between pastiche and p**stake.] From Thomas Hardy's football report to Dan Brown's visit to the cash dispenser, the work of the great and the not-so-great is here sent up with little hope of coming down. Most of these pieces began their life on Radio Four's The Write Stuff, but have been retooled for the printed page. Others, such as Martin Amis's first day at Hogwarts, have been written specially for this collection. Philip Larkin's Lines in Celebration of the Queen Mother's 115th Birthday, first banned, then cut by the BBC, appears in its entirety for the first time. This is not a book for the faint-hearted or the downstairs lavatory. It is a book for the bedside table of someone you cannot live without.

An eBook short. A dispatch from the underground world of Birdsong, a story of love and World War I.  In a stagnant war of trenches and barbed wire, there is one final desperate front: underground.  Jack Firebrace is part of an elite group of British tunnellers, miners by profession, without the military training of infantry but facing unfathomable dangers just the same, forty-five feet underground with several hundred thousand tons of France above their heads. Birdsong, published to international critical and popular acclaim, has become the canonical novel of romance and devastating violence in World War I. In this selection, we are introduced to Jack Firebrace, one of the novel’s central characters, and are given an unforgettable portrait of the lives of soldiers in an unimaginable position.

A sweeping drama about the madness of war and the power of love that marks acclaimed novelist Sebastian Faulks's return, after twenty years, to the fictional territory of his #1 international bestseller *Birdsong* London, 1980. Robert Hendricks, an established psychiatrist and author, has so bottled up memories of his own wartime past that he is nearly sunk into a life of aloneness and depression. Out of the blue, a baffling letter arrives from one Dr. Alexander Pereira, a neurologist and a World War I veteran who claims to be an admirer of Robert's published work. The letter brings Robert to the older man's home on a rocky, secluded island off the south of France, and into tempests of memories--his childhood as a fatherless English boy, the carnage he witnessed and the wound he can't remember receiving as a young officer in World War II, and, above all, the great, devastating love of his life, an Italian woman, "L," whom he met during the war. As Robert's recollections pour forth, he's unsure whether they will lead to psychosis--or redemption. But Dr. Pereira knows. Profoundly affecting and masterfully told, Where My Heart Used to Beat sweeps through the 20th century, brilliantly interrogating the darkest corners of the human mind and bearing tender witness to the abiding strength of love.

In The Fatal Englishman, his first work of nonfiction, Sebastian Faulks explores the lives of three remarkable men. Each had the seeds of greatness; each was a beacon to his generation and left something of value behind; yet each one died tragically young. Christopher Wood, only twenty-nine when he killed himself, was a painter who lived most of his short life in the beau monde of 1920s Paris, where his charm, good looks, and the dissolute life that followed them sometimes frustrated his ambition and achievement as an artist. Richard Hillary was a WWII fighter pilot who wrote a classic account of his experiences, The Last Enemy, but died in a mysterious training accident while defying doctor’s orders to stay grounded after horrific burn injuries; he was twenty-three. Jeremy Wolfenden, hailed by his contemporaries as the brightest Englishman of his generation, rejected the call of academia to become a hack journalist in Cold War Moscow. A spy, alcoholic, and open homosexual at a time when such activity was still illegal, he died at the age of thirty-one, a victim of his own recklessness and of the peculiar pressures of his time. Through the lives of these doomed young men, Faulks paints an oblique portrait of English society as it changed in the twentieth century, from the Victorian era to the modern world. From the Trade Paperback edition.

The events of Pietro Russell’s life are told in 26 chapters. From A-Z, each chapter is set in a different place and reveals a fragment of his story. As his memories flicker back and forth through time in his search for a resolution to the conflicts of his life, his story gradually unfolds.

From the author of Birdsong and A Week in December comes a dazzling new Sunday Times bestseller. Terrified, a young prisoner in the Second World War closes his eyes and pictures himself going out to bat on a sunlit cricket ground in Hampshire. Across the courtyard in a Victorian workhouse, a father too ashamed to acknowledge his son. A skinny girl steps out of a Chevy with a guitar; her voice sends shivers through the skull. Soldiers and lovers, parents and children, scientists and musicians risk their bodies and hearts in search of connection - some key to understanding what makes us the people we become. Provocative and profound, Sebastian Faulks's dazzling novel journeys across continents and time to explore the chaos created by love, separation and missed opportunities. From the pain and drama of these highly particular lives emerges a mysterious consolation: the chance to feel your heart beat in someone else's life.

Focusing on a richly significant time in our recent past, Sebastian Faulks, the bestselling author of Birdsong and Charlotte Gray, has written his first novel set in America. The year is 1960—a fascinating moment of transition in our country, when the comfortable Eisenhower years were drawing to a close and the ruthlessly competitive Nixon/Kennedy presidential campaign signaled the beginning of a starkly different decade. Mary van der Linden has recently moved from London to Washington, D.C., with her two children and her loving, admired husband, Charlie, who is posted to the British Embassy. Nearly forty, Mary has spent a lifetime as a loyal daughter, wife and mother. But in this year of so much change, she feels compelled to break away from her familiar world and is drawn to the freedom of New York City, which is effervescent with parties, jazz, three- martini lunches, girls in their summer dresses and men in their Sinatra hats and big ties. Greenwich Village is still charmingly bohemian, and Miles Davis’s hit tune “On Green Dolphin Street” is playing everywhere. Mary finds a hotel room in New York and then finds a lover, while back in Washington her husband drinks to forget the demands of his job, the absence of his wife and the Cold War paranoia that has overtaken the capital. Faulks breaks new ground with this novel: It is a love story, not a war story, and it is set in America rather than France. Yet readers of his two previous bestselling novels will recognize the close focus of the historical setting, the unforgettable characters and the gathering emotional power of the narrative. On Green Dolphin Street is a dramatic, tremendously moving novel that is certain to extend the American audience for this prodigiously talented author’s work.

A profound, moving and important collection of letters, diaries and memories of the First World War, edited by Sebastian Faulks - author of Birdsong - and Dr Hope Wolf. A Broken World presents a cacophony of voices from and about the Great War in a way never before collected together, telling the story of the conflict and its aftermath through memories and stories assembled by place and landscape. ** Sebastian Faulks and Hope Wolf have explored archives and autobiographical records to select true-life stories and experiences from diaries, letters, postcards, memoirs and other remembrances of this terrible conflict and its aftermath. When thinking about the First World War, images of trenches, no man's land, ruined towns, and fields of white crosses have endured. This collection will include memories from and about these places, but will also feature writing from less familiar environments: voices from deserts, air space and seascapes will jostle alongside war stories from hospitals, railways, monumnets, churches, theatres, factories, prison camps and the home. As Sebastian Faulks says: 'Much of the most exciting and illuminating writing on the First World War is found in private, unpublished documents. Some little-known or out-of-print published works also have important things to say. The centenary is the right time to shake up our received ideas of those four years. This anthology hopes to give a hearing to a Babel of urgent but little-known voices and to guide the reader through them to a deeper understanding.'

From the bestselling author of Birdsong comes Charlotte Gray, the remarkable story of a young Scottish woman who becomes caught up in the effort to liberate Occupied France from the Nazis while pursuing a perilous mission of her own. In blacked-out, wartime London, Charlotte Gray develops a dangerous passion for a battle-weary RAF pilot, and when he fails to return from a daring flight into France she is determined to find him. In the service of the Resistance, she travels to the village of Lavaurette, dyeing her hair and changing her name to conceal her identity. Here she will come face-to-face with the harrowing truth of what took place during Europe's darkest years, and will confront a terrifying secret that threatens to cast its shadow over the remainder of her days. Vividly rendered, tremendously moving, and with a narrative sweep and power reminiscent of his novel Birdsong, Charlotte Gray confirms Sebastian Faulks as one of the finest novelists working today.

As young boys both Jacques Rebière and Thomas Midwinter become fascinated with trying to understand the human mind. As psychiatrists, their quest takes them from the squalor of the Victorian lunatic asylum to the crowded lecture halls of the renowned Professor Charcot in Paris; from the heights of the Sierra Madre in California to the plains of unexplored Africa. As the concerns of the old century fade and the First World War divides Europe, the two men's volatile relationship develops and changes, but is always tempered by one exceptional woman; Thomas's sister Sonia. Moving and challenging in equal measure, Human Traces explores the question of what kind of beings men and women really are.

The death of my father left a hole in my family. Left bankrupt, my brother, Hansel is forced to sell our furniture and our jewels, but refuses to sell our home.What will we trade when the money runs dry? When the cupboards are bare and there’s still mouths to feed?Hansel looks at me now with the devil in his eyes. There’s only one who can save me from the fate Hansel has planned--my Ghost in the darkness, my wolf.  But Ghost is forced to leave without knowing Hansel’s bartering the only thing we have left. Me. And I don’t think he’ll be back to save me.

Orleigh is cursed. Or so the other villagers believe. With each harvest worse than the last, something must be done. And so they consult the Seer. A deal is struck: the village will thrive once more, but in return, Orleigh must be sacrificed to the Earth God, Teymos.​Years later, when Orleigh's closest friend, Piprin, learns that Orleigh might still be alive, he resolves to rescue her and to return her to the Land of Mortals. Guided by the Seer and the myths of his childhood, Piprin sets out on a quest to the Land of Gods, where mortals like him are forbidden.​But will Piprin survive his quest? And why is the Seer so interested in Orleigh's fate?​A tale of friendship, acceptance and self-discovery, filled with a new mythology, The Seer's Curse is a moving debut to be enjoyed by all fantasy fans.

“Don’t bother. It’s locked. There’s no way out of here. Even if you did get out, we’re surrounded by the forest. Please, don’t run, Belle. Don’t make me set the dogs free.”The drug on my lips linger, and the memory of my freedom slips further away while he drones. I thought I was free, hitchhiking along the Midnight Mountain Range, running from those I loved, and their betrayal. Now I’m trapped in a nightmare. One filled with betrayal, lust and a beast. That’s his story, about a beast that’s waiting for me. I try not to listen and plan my escape. But the savage howls from somewhere underneath this room makes me whimper in fear. Through the grimy windows, endless pine trees are all I can see.“He’s going to fall in love with you, I just know he will,” Mark says. The beast below isn’t the only one in this house. I’ve fought to survive before and I’ll fight again. Maybe this time, I’ll win.

Edited by the bestselling author of Birdsong and Dr Hope Wolf, this is an original and illuminating non-fiction anthology of writing on the First World War. A lieutenant writes of digging through bodies that have the consistency of Camembert cheese; a mother sends flower seeds to her son at the Front, hoping that one day someone may see them grow; a nurse tends a man back to health knowing he will be court-martialled and shot as soon as he is fit.In this extraordinarily powerful and diverse selection of diaries, letters and memories, the testament from ordinary people whose lives were transformed are set alongside extracts from names that have become synonymous with the war, such as Siegfried Sassoon and T.E. Lawrence. A Broken World is an original collection of personal and defining moments that offer an unprecedented insight into the Great War as it was experienced and as it was remembered.

In this unique and compelling anthology, Sebastian Faulks and Jorg Hensgen have collected the best fiction about war in the twentieth century. Ranging from the First World War to the Gulf War, these stories depict a soldier's experience from call-up, battle and comradeship, to leave, hospital and trauma in later life. Truly international in scope, this anthology includes stories by Erich Maria Remarque and Pat Barker, Isaac Babel and Ernest Hemingway, Heinrich Boll and Norman Mailer, JG Ballard and Tim O'Brien, Julian Barnes and Louis de Bernieres. Together they form a powerful and moving evocation of the horrors of war.

“Don’t bother. It’s locked. There’s no way out of here. Even if you did get out, we’re surrounded by the forest. Please, don’t run, Belle. Don’t make me set the dogs free.”The drug on my lips linger, and the memory of my freedom slips further away while he drones. I thought I was free, hitchhiking along the Midnight Mountain Range, running from those I loved, and their betrayal. Now I’m trapped in a nightmare. One filled with betrayal, lust and a beast. That’s his story, about a beast that’s waiting for me. I try not to listen and plan my escape. But the savage howls from somewhere underneath this room makes me whimper in fear. Through the grimy windows, endless pine trees are all I can see.“He’s going to fall in love with you, I just know he will,” Mark says. The beast below isn’t the only one in this house. I’ve fought to survive before and I’ll fight again. Maybe this time, I’ll win.

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.

The death of my father left a hole in my family. Left bankrupt, my brother, Hansel is forced to sell our furniture and our jewels, but refuses to sell our home.What will we trade when the money runs dry? When the cupboards are bare and there’s still mouths to feed?Hansel looks at me now with the devil in his eyes. There’s only one who can save me from the fate Hansel has planned--my Ghost in the darkness, my wolf.  But Ghost is forced to leave without knowing Hansel’s bartering the only thing we have left. Me. And I don’t think he’ll be back to save me.

Bond is back. With a vengeance. Devil May Care is a masterful continuation of the James Bond legacy–an electrifying new chapter in the life of the most iconic spy of literature and film, written to celebrate the centenary of Ian Fleming’s birth on May 28, 1908.An Algerian drug runner is savagely executed in the desolate outskirts of Paris. This seemingly isolated event leads to the recall of Agent 007 from his sabbatical in Rome and his return to the world of intrigue and danger where he is most at home. The head of MI6, M, assigns him to shadow the mysterious Dr. Julius Gorner, a power-crazed pharmaceutical magnate, whose wealth is exceeded only by his greed. Gorner has lately taken a disquieting interest in opiate derivatives, both legal and illegal, and this urgently bears looking into. Bond finds a willing accomplice in the shape of a glamorous Parisian named Scarlett Papava. He will need her help in a life-and-death struggle with his most dangerous adversary yet, as a chain of events threaten to lead to global catastrophe. A British airliner goes missing over Iraq. The thunder of a coming war echoes in the Middle East. And a tide of lethal narcotics threatens to engulf a Great Britain in the throes of the social upheavals of the late sixties. Picking up where Fleming left off, Sebastian Faulks takes Bond back to the height of the Cold War in a story of almost unbearable pace and tension. Devil May Care not only captures the very essence of Fleming’s original novels but also shows Bond facing dangers with a powerful relevance to our own times.Amazon.com Review10 THINGS YOU DIDN’T KNOW ABOUT JAMES BOND & IAN FLEMINGA QuizQ: Although James Bond is regarded by many as the quintessential English hero, he is actually not English. What is his nationality in the books?A: He is half Scottish and half Swiss. He also hates that most English of drinks, tea--and describes it as 'mud'! Q: Bond has had many famous incarnations on the big screen but, prior to these, he was first played on the radio by which British actor and game show host?A: Bob Holness of Blockbusters fameQ: Which Bond villain shares a birthday with his creator? A: Ernst Stavro Blofeld. On Her Majesty's Secret Service reveals that Blofeld was born on 28 May 1908. Ian Lancaster Fleming entered the world on the same day at 7 Green Street in London.Q: Which American President was a big fan of the Fleming novels?A: President John F. Kennedy. Kennedy was known to be a big fan of Fleming and listed From Russia With Love as one of his top 10 favourite books. Bizarrely, both Kennedy and his assassin Lee Harvey Oswald are believed to have been reading Bond novels the night before Kennedy was killed.Q: Which famed children’s author helped Ian Fleming adapt his children's adventure story Chitty Chitty Bang Bang for the big screen?A: Roald DahlQ: Where did Fleming write all his Bond books?A: At Goldeneye, his Jamaican home. Although now part of a luxurious holiday resort, the house was very basic in Fleming's time--so much so that his friend and neighbour Noel Coward referred to it as Goldeneye, Nose and Throat!Q: Although Ursula Andress wears the most famous bikini in cinema history in her iconic performance in Doctor No, in Fleming's novel of the same name the character Honeychile Rider wears even less. What does she wear?A: She is naked save for a knife-belt.Q: The first Bond novel, Casino Royale, originally had a different title when it was published in the US. Under what title was it initially published here?A: The initial title here was You Asked For It.Q: What is James Bond’s favorite meal?A: Breakfast. He has a particular penchant for scrambled eggs, and the short story 007 in New York even includes his own recipe for them.Q: Who is Miss Moneypenny named for? A: Miss Moneypenny was named after a character in an unpublished novel written by Ian Fleming's brother, the travel writer Peter Fleming. From Publishers WeeklyWith a delivery as cool and dry as a vodka martini, Tristan Layton brings numerous international locals and characters to life in Faulks' homage to Ian Fleming's greatest creation, James Bond. It's 1967 and agent 007 is on a forced rest leave, but it isn't long before a new threat to the British Empire and the world has M dragging him back into action. Evil genius Dr. Julius Gorner is out to destroy Britain by flooding England with heroin. He also has an even more diabolical plan waiting in the wings. Faulks follows Fleming's traditional framework, but it's Layton's performance that keeps the rather slow storyline moving. His reading nicely enhances Faulks's prose and his proper English intonation provides the perfect stage from which his rich, multi-accented characters can project. It is a smooth, easy performance that elevates the material. A Doubleday hardcover (reviewed online). (June) Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.