Birdsong

8vo., forest green publisher’s boards, lettered in silver to spine with publisher’s device to foot; grey endpapers; original unclipped pictorial dust jacket (£14.99 net) featuring a design by Garner Russell, pp. [x], 3-407, [i]; a very near fine copy, with very light bumping to head of spine and upper corner, small crease to front paste-down and a tiny damp stain to ffep; jacket also near fine, with a couple of very small creases and one light strip of sunning to the front panel. 

First edition, with full number line 1-9. This copy neatly signed to the title page. A contemporary newspaper review from the Sunday Times is also loosely laid in. 

Birdsong was Faulks’ fourth novel, but is arguably the one which truly launched him to fame. It follows the lives of Stephen Wraysford, a soldier serving on the front lines in Amiens during WWI, and in parallel his granddaughter Elizabeth Benson, following her journey as she tries to trace her grandfather’s history. “Faulks writes from the heart”, Times reviewer Kate Saunders writes, “the bells of Hell have not ting-a-linged so powerfully since the great memoirs of Graves, Blunden and Sassoon”. 

In 2012 the book was adapted into a two-part television drama for the BBC, starring Eddie Redmayne as Stephen Wraysford and Clémence Poésy as Isabelle Azaire. 

“If I am fighting on behalf of anyone, I think it is for those who have died. Not for the living at home. For the dead, over here.”

Increasingly scarce signed.  

SKU: 1800171