Vintage International Series

Mike Engleby says things that others dare not even think.

A man devoid of scruple or self-pity, he rises without trace in Thatcher's England and scorches through the blandscape of New Labour.

In the course of his brief, incandescent career, he and the reader encounter many famous people - actors, writers, politicians, household names - but by far the most memorable is Engleby himself.

This work is a lament for a generation and the country it failed. It is also a meditation on the limits of science, the curse of human consciousness and on the lyrics of 1970s rock music.

And beneath this highly disturbing surface lies an unfolding mystery of gripping narrative power. For when one of Mike's contemporaries unaccountably disappears the reader has to ask: is even the shameless Engleby capable of telling the whole truth?

A Week in December

by Sebastian Faulks

Published 3 September 2009

THE NUMBER ONE BESTSELLER

London, the week before Christmas, 2007. Seven wintry days to track the lives of seven characters: a hedge fund manager trying to bring off the biggest trade of his career; a professional footballer recently arrived from Poland; a young lawyer with little work and too much time to speculate; a student who has been led astray by Islamist theory; a hack book-reviewer; a schoolboy hooked on skunk and reality TV; and a Tube driver whose Circle Line train joins these and countless other lives together in a daily loop.

With daring skill, the novel pieces together the complex patterns and crossings of modern urban life, and the group is forced, one by one, to confront the true nature of the world they inhabit. Sweeping, satirical, Dickensian in scope, A Week in December is a thrilling state of the nation novel from a master of literary fiction.

Birdsong

by Sebastian Faulks

Published 16 September 1993

Birdsong is a novel about the tenderness and the limits of human flesh, 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 too moving to read. Faulks has brought to it the same richness of writing and emotional intimacy that characterised The Girl at the Lion d'Or, but has widened the scope to produce a novel of moving grandeur. Since its first publication, Birdsong has become a huge bestseller and one of the most popular literary novels of its generation. In 2012 it was adapted into an acclaimed two-part TV drama starring Eddie Redmayne.

Charlotte Gray

by Sebastian Faulks

Published 24 August 1998

In 1942, Charlotte Gray goes to Occupied France on a duel mission, to run a simple errand for a British special operations group and to find her lover, an English airman who has gone missing in action. It is in the town of Lavaurette that she finds friendship and experiences life under Nazi rule. From the author of BIRDSONG.

On Green Dolphin Street

by Sebastian Faulks

Published 1 January 1999

America, 1959. With two young children she adores, loving parents back in London, and an admired husband, Charlie, working at the British embassy in Washington, the world seems an effervescent place of parties, jazz and family happiness to Mary van der Linden. But the Eisenhower years are ending, and 1960 brings the presidential battle between two ambitious senators: John Kennedy and Richard Nixon. An American newspaper reporter called Frank Renzo dramatically enters the van der Lindens' lives, and through him Mary is forced to confront the terror of the Cold War that is the dark background of their carefree existence. In New York, Mary finds a transfiguring personal happiness, yet ghosts of America's recent past - of McCarthy, the war in the Pacific, the struggle in Indochina, exert a subtle, disorientating pressure on the lives of all the characters. In tone and setting, On Green Dolphin Street is a new departure for Faulks, yet readers will recognise the intensely close focus of the characterisation, the wide historical perspective in which it is set, and the gathering emotional power of the narrative.
This is partly a love story, partly a novel about America, across whose great landscape it moves; more particularly, it tells of a solitary woman and her exhilarating attempt to face down death.

Human Traces

by Sebastian Faulks

Published 29 August 2005

"Human Traces" explores the question of what kind of beings men and women really are. Jacques Rebiere and Thomas Midwinter, both sixteen when the story starts in 1876, come from different countries and contrasting families. They are united by an ambition to understand how the mind works and whether madness is the price we pay for being human. As psychiatrists, they travel on a quest 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. Their search is made urgent by the case of Jacques's brother Olivier, for whose severe illness no name has yet been found. Thomas's sister Sonia becomes the pivotal figure in the volatile relationship between the two men. It threatens to explode with the arrival in their Austrian sanatorium of an enigmatic patient, Fraulein Katharina von A, whose illness epitomises all that divides them. As the concerns of the old century fade and the First World War divides Europe, the novel rises to a climax in which the value of being alive is called into question.
This is Sebastian Faulks's most ambitious novel yet, with scenes of emotional power recalling his most celebrated work, yet set here on an even larger scale.

Girl at the Lion D'or

by Sebastian Faulks

Published August 1989

A haunting historical novel set in France between the two world wars about love and desire

FROM THE AUTHOR OF THE INTERNATIONAL BESTSELLER BIRDSONG

Mid-1930s, Northern France. A mysterious young girl named Anne Louvet arrives at the seedy Hotel du Lion d'Or in the small French town of Janvilliers. She is seeking a job and a new life, far removed from the injustices of her past. At the hotel, Anne meets the cultured, rich and married Hartmann and begins anaffair with the married Great War veteran, revealing her secrets, fears and hopes to him. From award-winning author Sebastian Faulks, Girl at The Lion d'Or is a powerful story of love and conscience, will and desire.

'Beautifully written and extraordinarily moving' The Sunday Times

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Also available by Sebastian Faulks as part of the French trilogy series:
Birdsong
Charlotte Gray