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The Best Fiction Books

Birdsong by Sebastian Faulks
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Birdsong

by Sebastian Faulks

Recommendations from our site

“I read an interesting interview with Sebastian Faulks where he said he is impatient with characters in books where the author clearly loves the character and wants you to as well. And so just everyone in the fictional world loves the character. He said, he’s always very careful to make sure that quite a few people in the book don’t like the character he likes. So the protagonist is a character—who I find very likeable, because he’s a little bit of a modern sub-in, he sees the world a little as we would—who everyone within the book thinks is a bit of an odd fish. They just don’t connect with him, you know, and that makes him feel very three-dimensional.” Read more...

The Best First World War Novels

Alice Winn, Novelist

Commentary

The other novel that could have been on the list is [Sebastian Faulks’s] Birdsong, which is a beautiful book, but because Sebastian has quite properly got a lot of attention, I thought it would be nice to choose something else.

The best books on Legacies of World War One recommended by Wade Davis

Other books by Sebastian Faulks

The Seventh Son by Sebastian Faulks

The Seventh Son
by Sebastian Faulks

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