New Releases by Sebastian Faulks

A sweeping, profound novel about faith in all its forms, and a rich portrait of an embattled post-World War II Britain, by one of the finest literary stylists working today. Philip Deval, a soldier recently returned from the beaches of Normandy, arrives in Palestine on a peace-keeping mission in the final days of the British Mandate. The Sea of Galilee glitters in the distance as war-weary troops marvel at the novelty of oranges and sun—a paradise that belies a fierce new conflict about to erupt. Some years later, Philip begins work teaching at a school in the English countryside and meets the enigmatic music mistress, Frances Darwood. Over long evenings spent listening to records in her music room, they grow close. But Philip is a changed man, and must confront the secrets and scars of all he has lived through—which threaten, even now, to upend his future. Farewell to Eden asks the question: How, after great suffering, do we retain our humanity, learn to love again, and believe in the promise of a better life?

'Genuinely thought-provoking' THE TIMES'Extraordinary' WILLIAM BOYD 'Faulks is an enviably graceful and economical writer' GUARDIANA CHILD WILL BE BORN WHO WILL CHANGE EVERYTHINGTech billionaire Lukas Parn has an ambitious plan. Behind the doors of the IVF clinic in his London institute, a daring switch is mad[Bokinfo].

"Cunningly crafted. . . . France's unquiet histories are brought to life by a master storyteller. " — Financial Times (UK) A story of resistance, complicity, and an unlikely, transformative friendship, set in Paris, from internationally bestselling novelist Sebastian Faulks. American historian Hannah intends to immerse herself in World War II research in Paris, wary of paying much attention to the city where a youthful misadventure once left her dejected. But a chance encounter with Tariq, a Moroccan teenager whose visions of the City of Lights as a world of opportunity and rebirth starkly contrast with her own, disrupts her plan. Hannah agrees to take Tariq in as a lodger, forming an unexpected connection with the young man. Yet as Tariq begins to assimilate into the country he risked his life to enter, he realizes that its dark past and current ills are far more complicated than he'd anticipated. And Hannah, diving deeper into her work on women's lives in Nazi-occupied Paris, uncovers a shocking piece of history that threatens to dismantle her core beliefs. Soon they each must question which sacrifices are worth their happiness and what, if anything, the tumultuous past century can teach them about the future. From the sweltering streets of Tangier to deep beneath Paris via the Metro, from the affecting recorded accounts of women in German-occupied France and into the future through our hopes for these characters, Paris Echo offers a tough and poignant story of injustices and dreams.

Robinson Crusoe discovers thousands of ‘half-naked savages’ having it large on Ibiza. James Bond is on a mission, as a 24-hour call-out plumber. ‘The young stable lad is a moody fellow,’ say reviewers of Wuthering Heights in The Good Hotel Guide. Hans Christian Andersen gets into the subprime mortgage racket. Stephen King attempts a love story that doesn’t involve buckets of blood. Robbie Burns cheers on Andy Murray at Wimbledon. And Harry Potter is left high and dry when Ginny kicks him out and keeps the house. Re-mixed and re-imagined, this is literature but not as you know it.

Londra, o săptămână înainte de Crăciun, 2007. Șapte zile, șapte personaje, de fapt, șapte vieți care se intersectează mai mult sau mai puțin, în atmosfera societății londoneze contemporane: un manager de fonduri speculative aflat în căutarea celei mai răsunătoare tranzacții a vieții sale, un jucător de fotbal profesionist recent sosit din Polonia, un tânăr avocat cu prea puține cazuri și prea mult timp pentru speculații teoretice, un student absorbit de teoriile islamiste, un autor de recenzii literare, un elev dependent de canabis și de reality-show-uri, și un conductor de metrou – o tânără al cărei traseu unește toate aceste vieți și multe altele într-un circuit zilnic. Ițele și tiparele complexe ale vieții urbane în lumea de astăzi se împletesc îndrăzneț. Resorturile actualei crize economice, manifestările fundamentalismului religios, prăpastia dintre generații, efectele dezumanizante ale erei electronice, dar și relațiile interumane, pigmentate cu una sau două povești de dragoste, sunt doar câteva dintre temele abordate cu un umor fin, dar acid. Adevărul stă scris în fața lor cu litere de-o șchioapă, și totuși, personajele refuză să-l vadă, continuând să-și joace rolurile mai departe, ca și când ziua de mâine ar fi doar un vis. „Secolul al nouăsprezecelea ne-a dat Bâlciul deșertăciunilor al lui Thackeray și Prietenul nostru comun al lui Dickens... Secolul douăzeci și unu ne oferă romanul lui Sebastian Faulks, O săptămână în decembrie.“ – The Sunday Times „Faulks este, fără îndoială, un veritabil maestru.“ – Financial Times

"A novel that artfully mixes memory and desire as a World War II veteran accesses painful memories of a wartime romance" from the author of The Seventh Son ( Kirkus Reviews, starred review). London, 1980. Robert Hendricks, an established psychiatrist and author, has so bottled up memories of his own wartime past that he is nearly sunk into a life of aloneness and depression. Out of the blue, a baffling letter arrives from one Dr. Alexander Pereira, a neurologist and a World War I veteran who claims to be an admirer of Robert's published work. The letter brings Robert to the older man's home on a rocky, secluded island off the south of France, and into tempests of memories—his childhood as a fatherless English boy, the carnage he witnessed and the wound he can't remember receiving as a young officer in World War II, and, above all, the great, devastating love of his life, an Italian woman, "L," whom he met during the war. As Robert's recollections pour forth, he's unsure whether they will lead to psychosis—or redemption. But Dr. Pereira knows. Profoundly affecting and masterfully told, Where My Heart Used to Beat sweeps through the 20th century, brilliantly interrogating the darkest corners of the human mind and bearing tender witness to the abiding strength of love. " Where My Heart Used to Beat . . . has wonderful strengths, especially Faulks' lucid, philosophical voice, and it's filled with scenes of genuine power." — USA Today "Faulks' appeal and popularity come from his confident balancing of historically accurate detail with ardent . . . sympathy for passionate private lives." — The New York Times Book Review "A profoundly moving novel." — The Independent (UK)

Focusing on a richly significant time in our recent past, Sebastian Faulks, the bestselling author of Birdsong and Charlotte Gray, has written his first novel set in America. The year is 1960—a fascinating moment of transition in our country, when the comfortable Eisenhower years were drawing to a close and the ruthlessly competitive Nixon/Kennedy presidential campaign signaled the beginning of a starkly different decade. Mary van der Linden has recently moved from London to Washington, D.C., with her two children and her loving, admired husband, Charlie, who is posted to the British Embassy. Nearly forty, Mary has spent a lifetime as a loyal daughter, wife and mother. But in this year of so much change, she feels compelled to break away from her familiar world and is drawn to the freedom of New York City, which is effervescent with parties, jazz, three- martini lunches, girls in their summer dresses and men in their Sinatra hats and big ties. Greenwich Village is still charmingly bohemian, and Miles Davis’s hit tune “On Green Dolphin Street” is playing everywhere. Mary finds a hotel room in New York and then finds a lover, while back in Washington her husband drinks to forget the demands of his job, the absence of his wife and the Cold War paranoia that has overtaken the capital. Faulks breaks new ground with this novel: It is a love story, not a war story, and it is set in America rather than France. Yet readers of his two previous bestselling novels will recognize the close focus of the historical setting, the unforgettable characters and the gathering emotional power of the narrative. On Green Dolphin Street is a dramatic, tremendously moving novel that is certain to extend the American audience for this prodigiously talented author’s work.

Faulks's first novel since the extraordinary success of Birdsong is written with the same passion, power and breadth of vision. Set in England and France during the darkest days of World War II, Charlotte Gray, like Birdsong, depicts a complex love affair that is both shaped and thwarted by war. It is 1942. London is blacked out, but France is under a greater darkness, as the occupying Nazi forces encroach ever closer in a tense waiting game. Charlotte Gray, a volatile but determined young woman, travels south from Edinburgh. Working in London, she has a brief but intense love affair with an RAF pilot. When his plane is lost over France, she contrives to go there herself to work in the Resistance and to search for him--but then is unwilling to leave as she finds that the struggle for the country's fate is intimately linked to her own battle to take control of her life. Faulks's novel is an examination of lost paradises, politics without belief, the limits of memory, the redemptive power of art and the existence of hope beyond reason. It is also a brilliant evocation of life in Occupied France and, more significantly, a revelation of the appalling price many Frenchmen paid to survive in unoccupied, so-called Free France. As the men, women and children of Charlotte's small town prepare to meet their terrible destiny, the truth of what took place in wartime France is finally exposed. When private lives and public events fatally collide, the roots of the characters' lives are torn up and exposed. These harrowing scenes are presented with the passion and narrative force that readers will recall from Birdsong. Charlotte Gray will attract even more readers to Faulks's remarkable fiction.

"Beautifully written and--extraordinarily moving."--The Sunday Times (London) From the author of the international bestseller Birdsong, comes a haunting historical novel of passion, loss, and courage set in France between the two world wars. This Vintage Original edition marks its first appearance in the United States. On a rainy night in the 1930s, Anne Louvet appears at the run-down Hotel du Lion d'Or in the village of Janvilliers. She is seeking a job and a new life, one far removed from the awful injustices of her past. As Anne embarks on a torrential love affair with a married veteran of the Great War, The Girl at the Lion d'Or fashions an unbreakable spell of narrative and atmosphere that evokes French masters from Flaubert to Renoir. "This moving and profound novel is perfectly constructed, and admirable in its configurations of place and period."--The Times (London) "I would urge those who appreciated--The French Lieutenant's Woman to try this one--. They may well think it superior."--Sunday Telegraph (London)

En vakker og mektig historie om kjærlighet og samvittighet, vilje og lyst. Piken på vertshuset er en frittstående del av trilogien som ellers består av Fuglesang og Charlotte Gray. På vertshuset Lion d’Or i en liten fransk by i 1930-årene blir tjenestejenta Anne Louvert raskt kjent med både stab og gjester. Særlig den følsomme Hartmann fanger hennes oppmerksomhet. Hartmann er både rik og gift, men det hindrer ham ikke i å innlede et forhold til unge Anne. Hun avslører sine hemmeligheter og håp for ham, trygg på hans kjærlighet. Hans kone, Christine, kjenner ham derimot bedre. Hun er vant til å måtte kvitte seg med brysomme rivaler.

Five people, separated by place and time, risk their bodies and hearts in search of connection in this novel that explores love, loss, and what makes us human.

Stephen Wraysford è un ventenne inglese, orfano e senza più legami, trasferitosi in Francia per lavorare in un’industria tessile. Isabelle è una ragazza irreprensibile, che rispetta, con rassegnazione, i doveri coniugali di un matrimonio combinato. Quando si incontrano, ad Amiens, nel 1910, i due vengono travolti da una passione bruciante che non possono ignorare. Ma quando Isabelle scopre di essere incinta, la loro relazione s’interrompe bruscamente. Entrambi torneranno alla vita di tutti i giorni, ma la cicatrice di quell’amore segnerà per sempre le loro esistenze. Pochi anni dopo, la Grande Guerra sconvolge il continente. Nel 1917 Stephen è di nuovo in Francia, a lottare per la vita nel corso dei conflitti in cui si ritroverà a combattere tra le fila dell’esercito inglese, nel mezzo delle carneficine a cui dovrà assistere. Sopravvissuto, e di nuovo sui luoghi della passione, ritroverà Isabelle, profondamente segnata, nel corpo e nello spirito, dalle atrocità del conflitto; ma, per l’indecifrabile alchimia dei sentimenti, ne sposerà la sorella, Jeanne.

In the blustery final days of 2007, seven characters will reach an unexpected turning point: a hedge fund manager pulling off a trade, a professional football player recently arrived from Poland, a young lawyer with too much time on his hands, a student led astray by Islamist theory, a hack book reviewer, a schoolboy hooked on pot and reality TV, and a Tube train driver whose Circle Line train joins these lives in a daily loop. And as the novel moves to its gripping climax, they are forced, one by one, to confront the new world they inhabit. Panoramic and masterful, A Week in December melds moral heft and piercing wit, holding a mirror up to the complex patterns and crossings of modern urban life.

The publication of Robinson Crusoe in London in 1719 marked the arrival of a revolutionary art form: the novel. British writers were prominent in shaping the new type of storyteller, one which reflected the experiences of ordinary people, with characters in whom readers could find not only an escape, but a deeper understanding of their own lives: container

While staying as the guest of a factory owner in pre-First World War France, Stephen Wraysford embarks on a passionate affair with Isabelle, the wife of his host. The affair changes them both for ever.A few years later Stephen finds himself back in the same part of France, but this time as a soldier in the Battle of the Somme, the bloodiest encounter in British military history. As his men die around him, Stephen turns to his enduring love for Isabelle for the strength to continue and to save something for future generations. For the first time, this beautiful and terrible story about love, courage and the endurance of the human spirit is brought to the stage in a version by Rachel Wagstaff, directed by famed director Trevor Nunn.

In The Fatal Englishman, his first work of nonfiction, Sebastian Faulks explores the lives of three remarkable men. Each had the seeds of greatness; each was a beacon to his generation and left something of value behind; yet each one died tragically young. Christopher Wood, only twenty-nine when he killed himself, was a painter who lived most of his short life in the beau monde of 1920s Paris, where his charm, good looks, and the dissolute life that followed them sometimes frustrated his ambition and achievement as an artist. Richard Hillary was a WWII fighter pilot who wrote a classic account of his experiences, The Last Enemy, but died in a mysterious training accident while defying doctor’s orders to stay grounded after horrific burn injuries; he was twenty-three. Jeremy Wolfenden, hailed by his contemporaries as the brightest Englishman of his generation, rejected the call of academia to become a hack journalist in Cold War Moscow. A spy, alcoholic, and open homosexual at a time when such activity was still illegal, he died at the age of thirty-one, a victim of his own recklessness and of the peculiar pressures of his time. Through the lives of these doomed young men, Faulks paints an oblique portrait of English society as it changed in the twentieth century, from the Victorian era to the modern world.

Set in the Cold War, and follows the action of Bond across two continents and exotic locations after he is assigned to shadow a mysterious, power-crazed pharmaceutical magnate with an interest in opiate derivatives.

Set in the Cold War, and follows the action of Bond across two contintents and exotic locations after he is assigned to shadow a mysterious, power-crazed pharmaceutical magnate with an interest in opiate deriviates.

Bestselling British author Faulks reinvents the unreliable narrator with his singular, haunting creation Mike Engleby, who leads the reader down an unclear and often darkly humorous path where one is never completely comfortable or confident about what is true.

Na een verboden liefdesverhouding blijft een jonge Brit in Frankrijk, waar hij tijdens de Eerste Wereldoorlog in de hel van de loopgraven terechtkomt.