num_pages: 503
description: "Birdsong" is a novel about the tenderness and the limits of human flesh, it is about men and women living at the edge. Set mostly in France spanning the years before and during the First World War, it captures the drama and destruction of that era as it tells the story of Stephen, a young Englishman who is impelled through a series of extreme experiences, from a traumatic clandestine love affair which rips apart the bourgeois French family he lives with, through grim insanity of the Great War. In the vast scenes of suffering and the tender depiction of human love, "Birdsong" is at times almost unbearably moving to read.
language: English
title: Birdsong
titlecomplete: Birdsong
characters: Elizabeth Benson, Isabelle Azaire, Stephen Wraysford
genres: Fiction, Historical, France, War, World War I, Romance, Literature, Classics, Novels, Historical Fiction
ratings_count: 77191
places: France, London, England
awards: awardedAt: 1262332800000
name: Premio Internacional de Novela Histórica Ciudad de Zaragoza
publisher: Random House