Powerful contemporary novel set in London from a master of literary fiction. THE NUMBER ONE BESTSELLER London, the week before Christmas, 2007. Seven wintry days to track the lives of seven characters: a hedge fund manager trying to bring off the biggest trade of his career; a professional footballer recently arrived from Poland; a young lawyer with little work and too much time to speculate; a student who has been led astray by Islamist theory; a hack book-reviewer; a schoolboy hooked on skunk and reality TV; and a Tube driver whose Circle Line train joins these and countless other lives together in a daily loop. With daring skill, the novel pieces together the complex patterns and crossings of modern urban life, and the group is forced, one by one, to confront the true nature of the world they inhabit. Sweeping, satirical, Dickensian in scope, A Week in December is a thrilling state of the nation novel from a master of literary fiction.

A novel of overwhelming emotional power, Birdsong is a story of love, death, sex and survival. Stephen Wraysford, a young Englishman, arrives in Amiens in northern France in 1910 to stay with the Azaire family, and falls in love with unhappily married Isabelle. But, with the world on the brink of war, the relationship falters, and Stephen volunteers to fight on the Western Front. His love for Isabelle forever engraved on his heart, he experiences the unprecedented horrors of that conflict — from which neither he nor any reader of this book can emerge unchanged.

gloriously witty novel from Sebastian Faulks using P.G. Wodehouse's much-loved characters, Jeeves and Wooster, fully authorised by the Wodehouse estate. Due to a series of extenuating circumstances, Bertie Wooster, recently returned from a very pleasurable sojourn in Cannes, finds himself at the home of Sir Henry Hackwood. Bertie is, of course, familiar with the set-up at a country house. He can always rely on Jeeves, his loyal butler to have packed the correct number of trousers and is a natural at cocktail hour. But this time, it is Jeeves who can be found in the drawing room, while Bertie finds himself below stairs. As is so often the case, love is the cause of the confusion. You see, Bertie met Georgiana, Georgiana liked Bertie, the feeling was mutual. Though he could be said to suffer from a reputation for flirtations, it looks as though this is the real deal. However, Georgiana is a ward of Sir Henry Hackwood and, in order to maintain his beloved Melbury Hall, Hackwood has already struck a deal would see Georgiana becoming Mrs Rupert Venables. Meanwhile, Peregrine 'Woody' Beeching is trying to regain the trust of his fiancee Amelia. But why would this necessitate Bertie having to pass himself off as a valet when he has never so much as made a cup of tea? Could it be that every loyal, self-effacing, Kant loving, Jeeves has an ulterior motive? But future happiness is not the only thing at stake: there is a frightfully important cricket match and the loaded question of who one fancies for Ascot. Evoking the sunlit days of a time gone-by, Jeeves and the Wedding Bells is a delightfully witty story of love, reputation and mistaken intentions.

Set before and during the great war, Birdsong captures the drama of that era on both a national and a personal scale. It is the story of Stephen, a young Englishman, who arrives in Amiens in 1910. Over the course of the novel he suffers a series of traumatic experiences, from the clandestine love affair that tears apart the family with whom he lives, to the unprecedented experiences of the war itself.

A gloriously witty novel from Sebastian Faulks using P.G. Wodehouse's much-loved characters, Jeeves and Wooster, fully authorised by the Wodehouse estate. Due to a series of extenuating circumstances, Bertie Wooster, recently returned from a very pleasurable sojourn in Cannes, finds himself at the home of Sir Henry Hackwood. Bertie is, of course, familiar with the set-up at a country house. He can always rely on Jeeves, his loyal butler to have packed the correct number of trousers and is a natural at cocktail hour. But this time, it is Jeeves who can be found in the drawing room, while Bertie finds himself below stairs. As is so often the case, love is the cause of the confusion. You see, Bertie met Georgiana, Georgiana liked Bertie, the feeling was mutual. Though he could be said to suffer from a reputation for flirtations, it looks as though this is the real deal. However, Georgiana is a ward of Sir Henry Hackwood and, in order to maintain his beloved Melbury Hall, Hackwood has already struck a deal would see Georgiana becoming Mrs Rupert Venables. Meanwhile, Peregrine 'Woody' Beeching is trying to regain the trust of his fiancee Amelia. But why would this necessitate Bertie having to pass himself off as a valet when he has never so much as made a cup of tea? Could it be that every loyal, self-effacing, Kant loving, Jeeves has an ulterior motive? But future happiness is not the only thing at stake: there is a frightfully important cricket match and the loaded question of who one fancies for Ascot. Evoking the sunlit days of a time gone-by, Jeeves and the Wedding Bells is a delightfully witty story of love, reputation and mistaken intentions.

This is a gloriously witty novel from Sebastian Faulks using P.G. Wodehouse's much-loved characters, Jeeves and Wooster, fully authorised by the Wodehouse estate. Due to a series of extenuating circumstances, Bertie Wooster, recently returned from a very pleasurable sojourn in Cannes, finds himself at the home of Sir Henry Hackwood. Bertie is, of course, familiar with the set-up at a country house. He can always rely on Jeeves, his loyal butler, to have packed the correct number of trousers and is a natural at cocktail hour. But this time, it is Jeeves who can be found in the drawing room, while Bertie finds himself below stairs. As is so often the case, love is the cause of the confusion. You see, Bertie met Georgiana, Georgiana liked Bertie, and the feeling was mutual. Though he could be said to suffer from a reputation for flirtations, it looks as though this is the real deal. However, Georgiana is a ward of Sir Henry Hackwood and, in order to maintain his beloved Melbury Hall, Hackwood has already struck a deal would see Georgiana becoming Mrs Rupert Venables. Meanwhile, Peregrine 'Woody' Beeching is trying to regain the trust of his fiancee Amelia. But why would this necessitate Bertie having to pass himself off as a valet when he has never so much as made a cup of tea? Could it be that every loyal, self-effacing, Kant loving, Jeeves has an ulterior motive? But future happiness is not the only thing at stake: there is a frightfully important cricket match and the loaded question of who one fancies for Ascot. Evoking the sunlit days of a time gone-by, Jeeves And The Wedding Bells is a delightfully witty story of love, reputation and mistaken intentions.

London, the week before Christmas, 2007. Over seven days, we follow the lives of seven major characters: a hedge fund manager trying to bring off the biggest trade of his career; a professional footballer recently arrived from Poland; a young lawyer with little work and too much time to speculate; a student who has been led astray by Islamist theory; a hack book-reviewer; a schoolboy hooked on skunk and reality TV; and, a Tube train driver whose Circle Line train joins these and countless other lives together in a daily loop. With daring skill, the novel pieces together the complex patterns and crossings of modern urban life. Greed, the dehumanising effects of the electronic age and the fragmentation of society are some of the themes dealt with in this savagely humorous book. The writing on the wall appears in letters ten feet high, but the characters refuse to see it — and party on as though tomorrow is a dream. Sebastian Faulks probes not only the self-deceptions of this intensely realised group of people, but their hopes and loves as well. As the novel moves to its gripping climax, they are forced, one by one, to confront the true nature of the world they inhabit.

Mike Engleby says things that others dare not even think. When the novel opens in the 1970s, he is a university student, having survived a 'traditional' school. A man devoid of scruple or self-pity, Engleby provides a disarmingly frank account of English education. Yet beneath the disturbing surface of his observations lies an unfolding mystery of gripping power. One of his contemporaries unaccountably disappears, and as we follow Engleby's career, which brings us up to the present day, the reader has to ask: is Engleby capable of telling the whole truth?

In 1942, Charlotte Gray, a young scottish woman, goes to Occupied France on a dual mission: to run an apparently simple errand for a British special operations group and to search for her lover, an English airman who has gone missing in action. In the small town of Lavaurette, Sebastian Faulks presents a microcosm of France and its agony in 'the black years'. Here is the full range of collaboration, from the tacit to the enthusiastic, as well as examples of extraordinary courage and altruism. Through the local resistance chief Julien, Charlotte meets his father, a Jewish painter whose inspiration has failed him. In a series of shocking narrative climaxes in which the full extent of French collusion in the Nazi holocaust is delineated, Faulks brings the story to a resolution of redemptive love. In the delicacy of its writing, the intimacy of its characterisation and its powerful narrative scenes of harrowing public events, Charlotte Gray is a worthy successor to Birdsong.

Human Traces explores the question of what kind of beings men and women really are. Jacques Rebiere and Thomas Midwinter, both sixteen when the story starts in 1876, come from different countries and contrasting families. They are united by an ambition to understand how the mind works and whether madness is the price we pay for being human. As psychiatrists, they travel on a quest from the squalor of the Victorian lunatic asylum to the crowded lecture halls of the renowned Professor Charcot in Paris; from the heights of the Sierra Madre in California to the plains of unexplored Africa. Their search is made urgent by the case of Jacques' brother Olivier, for whose severe illness no name has yet been found. Thomas' sister Sonia becomes the pivotal figure in the volatile relationship between the two men. It threatens to explode with the arrival in their Austrian sanatorium of an enigmatic patient, Fraulein Katharina von A, whose illness epitomises all that divides them. As the concerns of the old century fade and the First World War divides Europe, the novel rises to a climax in which the value of being alive is called into question. This is Sebastian Faulks' most ambitious novel yet, with scenes of emotional power recalling his most celebrated work, yet set here on an even larger scale.