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a world of fiction that is as tragic as
A Farewell to Arms
and as sensuous as
The English Patient
. Crafted from the ruins of war and the indestructibility of love,
Birdsong
is a novel that will be read and marveled at for years to come.
    Fiction/Literature
    CHARLOTTE GRAY
    In blacked-out, wartime London, Charlotte Gray develops a dangerous passion for a battle-weary RAF pilot, and when he fails to return from a daring flight into France she is determined to find him. In the service of the Resistance, she travels to the village of Lavaurette, dyeing her hair and changing her name to conceal her identity. Here she will come face-to-face with the harrowing truth of what took place during Europe’s darkest years, and will confront a terrifying secret that threatens to cast its shadow over the remainder of her days.
    Fiction/Literature
    ENGLEBY
    Meet Mike Engleby, a second-year student at university. Despite the fact that Mike is obviously intelligent, and involved in many clubs, it is clear that something about Mike is not quite right. When he becomes fixated on a classmate named Jennifer Arkland, and she goes missing, we are left with the looming question: Is Mike Engleby involved?
    Fiction/Literature
    THE FATAL ENGLISHMAN
Three Short Lives
    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.
    Biography
    THE GIRL AT THE LION D’OR
    On a rainy night in the 1930s, a young girl appears at the run-down Hotel du Lion d’Or in the seaside village of Janvilliers. She calls herself Anne Louvet; she is looking for work. And although her open-heartedness charms everyone but the inn’s forbidding proprietress, it is clear that she has a secret. Soon Anne falls in love with Charles Hartmann, a married veteran of the Great War who harbors his own burden of tragedy. As it follows their torrential affair,
The Girl at the Lion d’Or
weaves an unbreakable spell of narrative, mood, and character that evokes French masters from Flaubert to Renoir.
    Fiction/Literature
    HUMAN TRACES
    A fateful seaside meeting sets two young men on a profound course of friendship and discovery; they will become pioneers in the burgeoning field of psychiatry. But when a female patient at the doctors’ Austrian sanatorium becomes dangerously ill, the two men’s conflicting diagnosis threatens to divide them—and to undermine all their professional achievements.
    Fiction/Literature
    ON GREEN DOLPHIN STREET
    Faulks’s heroine is Mary van der Linden, a pretty, reserved Englishwoman whose husband, Charlie, is posted to the British embassy in Washington. One night at a cocktail party Mary meets Frank Renzo, a reporter who has covered stories from the fall of Dien Bien Phu to the Emmett Till murder trial in