Summary and Reviews of Birdsong by Sebastian Faulks

Media Reviews

Los Angeles Times Book Review - George Garrett Worthy in every way of its honors and success..The accounts of combat, ringing with credibility and authenticity, are among the finest that I have ever read.

The New York Times Book Review - Michael Gorra Birdsong seems to me superb. His prose is spare and precise.... Mr. Faulks's elaborate structure merely demonstrates how quickly innovation can be reduced to a formula. The present-day scenes in Birdsong are so lackluster that they seem a kind of injustice; I can scarcely believe they're the work of the same writer who in this book's best pages draws on Owen's great poem to provide a genuinely cathartic description of the war's last days.

New Yorker - Simon Schama Ambitious, outrageous, poignant, sleep-disturbing, Birdsong is not a prefect novel--just a great one.

Daily Mail - Quentin Crewe An amazing book--among the most stirringly erotic I have read for years...I have read it and re-read it and can think of no other novel for many, many years that has so moved me or stimulated in me so much reflection on the human spirit.

Mail on Sunday - Brian Masters One of the finest novels of the last 40 years.

Sunday Express - Andrew James This book is so powerful that as I finished it I turned to the front to start again.

Time Out - Nigel Watts This is literature at its very best: a book with the power to reveal the unimagined, so that one's life is set in a changed context. I urge you to read it.

Publishers Weekly Enlivened with considerable historical detail related through accomplished prose, his narrative flows with a pleasingly appropriate recklessness that brings his characters to dynamic life.

Booklist - Gilbert Taylor As typical of the "lost generation" of Britain (where this novel was a best-seller), the Wraysford antihero realistically conveys what a waste--in lives and psyches--the trench experience was. A well-crafted glimpse into gloom.

 Frank Conroy Birdsong moved me more profoundly than anything I've read in years.... A deeply compassionate, utterly thrilling work by a master of the form.