In brief When Stephen Wraysford is sent to Amiens in 1910 to learn what he can about the French textile business, he finds himself obsessed with his host's wife. The couple begin an affair so passionate that it rocks both their lives. Six years later, Stephen is again in Picardy, fighting as an officer in the British Army. Possessed by a seemingly invincible will to survive, he lives through some of the fiercest battles of the Western Front. Sixty years after the war, his granddaughter, Elizabeth, begins a journey into the past as she tries to understand both the grandfather she never knew and the terrible events which shaped his life.
Birdsong tells the harrowing story of men who lived in conditions that are barely imaginable.
Forced to witness the gruesome deaths of friends and enemies alike, they look for ways to survive in a world fractured by one of the bloodiest wars of the twentieth century. Although not originally intended as a trilogy, Birdsong , The Girl at the Lion D'Or, and Charlotte Gray are all linked through location, history and several minor characters. Birdsong and Charlotte Gray are firmly set in the arenas of war, but in both novels Faulks vividly depicts the personal lives of his characters. We are made vividly aware of people who are much like ourselves, but whose lives have been thrown into chaos by events far greater than any they have ever known before. Birdsong is largely set on the Western Front in the First World War.