Non-Fiction Books

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.

he British invented the novel, with the publication of Robinson Crusoe in 1719 marking the arrival of a revolutionary and distinctly modern form of art. But it's also true, as Sebastian Faulks argues in this remarkable book, that the novel helped invent the British: for the first time we had stories that reflected the experiences of ordinary people, with characters in which we could find our reality, our understanding and our escape. In Faulks on Fiction , Faulks examines many of these enduring fictional characters from over the centuries -- Heroes from Tom Jones to John Self, Lovers from Mr Darcy to Lady Chatterly, Villains from Fagin to Barbara Covett, and Snobs from Emma Woodhouse to James Bond -- and shows us how they mapped and inspired the British psyche, and continue to do so. Published to coincide with a major BBC series, Faulks on Fiction is an engaging and opinionated look at the psychology of the British through their literature, and a unique social history of Britain from one of our most respected writers. From the Trade Paperback edition.

Emphasizing the tension between promoting the qualities of leaders and heroes and reflecting the true horrors of the ordinary soldier's experience, this catalogue of an exhibition held at the National Portrait Gallery assesses the First World War through portraiture. It brings together the work of artists, photographers, filmmakers and sculptors, with images ranging from official war artist William Orpen's portrait of Field Marshal Haig to Gilbert Rogers's painting of a dead stretcher-bearer and Max Beckman's nightmarish self-portrait with a disfigured veteran.

Edited by the bestselling author of Birdsong and Dr Hope Wolf , this is an original and illuminating non-fiction anthology of writing on World War I. A lieutenant writes of digging through bodies that have the consistency of Camembert cheese; a mother sends flower seeds to her son at the Front, hoping that one day someone may see them grow; a nurse tends a man back to health knowing he will be court-martialed and shot as soon as he is fit. In this extraordinarily powerful and diverse selection of diaries, letters, and memories—many of which have never been published before—privates and officers, seamen and airmen, munitions workers and mothers, nurses and pacifists, prisoners-of-war and conscientious objectors appear alongside each other. The war involved people from so many different backgrounds and countries and included here are, among others, British, German, Russian, and Indian voices. Alongside testament from the many ordinary people whose lives were transformed by the events of 1914-18, there are extracts from names that have become synonymous with the war, such as Siegfried Sassoon and T.E. Lawrence. What unites them is a desire to express something of the horror, the loss, the confusion, and the desire to help—or to protest. A Broken World is an original collection of personal and defining moments that offer an unprecedented insight into World War I as it was experienced and as it was remembered.