Birdsong is a novel about the tenderness & the limits of human flesh 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 too moving to read. Faulks has brought to it the same richness of writing & emotional intimacy that characterised The Girl at the Lion d Or but has widened the scope to produce a novel of moving grandeur. Since its first publication Birdsong has become a huge bestseller & one of the most popular literary novels of its generation. In 2012 it was adapted into an acclaimed two-part TV drama starring Eddie Redmayne.