I enjoyed this book set in contemporary London (2007) and following the lives of seven principle characters over seven days. The idea behind it was great and some of the characters, though not all, were well developed but I have to admit to skipping through a lot of the detail of hedge funds and ...
A Possible Life is more a collection of short stories rather than a novel but what a collection they are. They are all centred on ordinary people just living their lives but Faulks writes their lives in such beautiful, absorbing detail that I just could not put this down. The story of Geoffrey in...
As many of you know, I **adore** PG Wodehouse, and the Jeeves books in specific. These are stories that make me laugh out loud, sometimes so much so that I have to put down the book, giggling myself silly, then slowly recover and resume. To be frank, only "Calvin and Hobbes" and David Sedaris h...
Human Traces is a a huge and ambitious novel, which aims to explore the development of psychiatry, psychoanalysis and neurology in the late 19th and early 20th century. It took Sebastian Faulks five years to write, and involved spending hundreds of hours on research and creating charts and timeli...
While the three mini-biographies in this volume were clearly told, I reamin unsure as to why it recieved plaudits. There were some links between the lives and fates of the men that justified putting them together but for me it was nothing special, sorry. The story of the self-destructive airman w...
Early Sebastian Faulks novels convey a wonderful sense of time and place and ‘On Green Dolphin Street’ set in 1959, evokes perfectly the period of the later Cold War, the insidious investigations of the FBI, McCarthyism, U2 Spy Planes, the rise of JFK and his historic election victory of Nixon, ...
This is a historical romance novel, the first of Sebastian Faulks’ ‘French Trilogy’, the other two being ‘Birdsong’ and ‘Charlotte Grey’, and all three are set in France, during the Great War, the Inter-War period and the Second World War. This novel, being the first he wrote in this trilogy, is ...
The hype on the cover of this book published suggested that this would be a memorable reading experience...it wasn't. To be sure, there were parts that I found well-written and engaging but overall, it was a disappointment and in places, barely credible. Charlotte Gray moves from the Scottish Hig...
Sebastian Faulks could write about just about anything and make it artistic and meaningful. That being said, A Fool's Alphabet was quite a difficult for me to read. The constant chronological and geographic shifting isn't the problem as some would have you believe, it's more the fact that ostensi...
My taste in contemporary fiction tends towards authors - Coetzee, Saramago, Barrico, DeLillo, Gustafsson, Murakami, Oshiguro - that master the art of meshing the darkly epic, the philosophically profound and the mildly surrealist into a compelling literary edifice. A few weeks ago I hurriedly pic...