
Birdsong is a novel about the tenderness & the limits of human flesh it is about men & women living at the edge Set mostly in France spanning the years before & during the First World War it captures the drama & destruction of that era as it tells the story of Stephen a young Englishman who is impelled through a series of extreme experiences from a traumatic clandestine love affair which rips apart the bourgeois French family he lives with through grim insanity of the Great War In the vast scenes of suffering & the tender depiction of human love Birdsong is at times almost unbearably moving to read