Birdsong
A Novel of Love and War
The Somme from above and the tunnellers below it, listening in the dark for the enemy digging back.
Faulks moves between an affair in pre-war Amiens and the same man’s war underground, among the tunnellers who dug beneath the trenches to lay mines and listened in the dark for the enemy digging back. The Somme sequence is the one people remember and the one other novelists give up on matching. Published in 1993, it did more than any other book to put the First World War back into popular reading.
Recommended by 1 Person
Alice Winn
Birdsong, I would almost say, is a quite straightforward depiction of war. It gets the job done. When I was trying to write a scene set at the Battle of the Somme, I remembered reading Birdsong when I was around twenty, and weeping at the hairdressers—which was quite uncomfortable, they were like: ‘Can you stop crying quite so much?’ So I looked back, re-read the Somme scene. And it was so perfectly written.
Interview · April 2023
As an Amazon Associate, bookstoread.org earns from qualifying purchases. Links to Amazon on this page may earn us a commission at no extra cost to you. Spotted an error on this page? Tell us and we will fix it.