Birdsong: A Novel of Love and War (Vintage International)

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It is taught at school and university on both English and History syllabuses; it has sold more than two million copies in the United Kingdom and three million worldwide; it has been used at Sandhurst to instruct young officers in the realities of warfare; in polls it is regularly voted one of the nation’s favourite books. Gorra described the novel as even more original than Barker's The Ghost Road and the rest of her Regeneration Trilogy. It is some of the most powerful writing I have seen, and the chilling coldness with which Wraysford treats all this is really evocative. With minimalist, evocative illustrations of the Canadian countryside, this book is a joy read (or just look at). There's a love affair, so passionate, but yet illicit and at first I thought that this is what was going to get to me in this novel.

Birdsong by Sebastian Faulks | Waterstones

In 1910 a young Englishman, Stephen Wraysford, goes to Picardy, France, to learn the textile business. Other single men moved, and began to come up like worms from their shellholes, limping, crawling, dragging themselves out. When you think of courage, of determination, of the best that men can be in a situation where there is nothing but death and decay, you will think of Stephen's story.The third part is where the soldiers are require to venture back into No Man’s Land and collect the bodies of their dead. I believe that force has its own reason and it's own morality even if they may never be clear to me while I am alive.

Bird Song and Call Identification for Beginners - Woodland Trust Bird Song and Call Identification for Beginners - Woodland Trust

The contemporary historian Simon Wessley describes the novel, alongside Barker's Regeneration, as an exemplar of contemporary fiction which uses the experience of the World War I trenches to examine more contemporary understandings of PTSD. Flett offers a love and recognition of nature and its tranquil effects, suggesting that even as days come to pass, nature will always remain. In the description of the first day of the Battle of the Somme, death comes so thick that the narrative cannot pause for individuals.In the autumn of 1918, Stephen is trapped underground when an explosion brings down the roof on a tunnel where he has gone with Jack Firebrace, the miner whom he had once threatened to have court-martialled.

Birdsong by Sebastian Faulks: Summary and reviews - BookBrowse

Oftentimes, it got to the point in my reading where I felt I just could not go on, and yet I could not stop. With the help of a friend at work, she eventually decodes it and learns that her mother is Stephen and Isabelle’s daughter. For Mullen, this gives the effect of "[t]he novelist painfully manipulat[ing] the reader's emotions. Find out which yellow and blue bird can lay up to 12 speckled eggs at a time, which bird has a different accent according to where they are from and which glorious green creature has a beak perfectly shaped for cracking open nuts and seeds.The novel has been favourably compared to other World War I and II novels, including All Quiet on the Western Front, The Young Lions and War and Remembrance. The accounts of combat, ringing with credibility and authenticity, are among the finest that I have ever read. Note: It makes it even more personal to me as I was in the Royal Engineers (Sappers) during my military career. There are other encounters throughout the book, but I found this to be one of the most sexually arousing pieces of writing that I have ever read.

Birdsong by Sebastian Faulks | Goodreads

This scene, which is difficult to stomach seeing as Faulk’s can perfectly describe the state of a body who has been left to the elements for two weeks, was unbearably haunting. The writing and story, so powerfully told were only slightly marred by the woman, Isabelle, Stephen's love.Faulks’s fourth novel and the second in his French trilogy has become a classic of modern English literature. Birdsong" follows Englishman Stephen Wraysford from a prewar intense relationship with a married French woman to the battlefield of the Somme. All in all, this was Stephen's story and one that all should hear no matter how many years have passed since The Great War.