Birdsong (novel) Birdsong (novel) Birdsong is a 1993 war novel and family saga by the English author Sebastian Faulks. It is Faulks' fourth novel. The plot follows two main characters living at different times: the first is Stephen Wraysford, a British soldier on the front line in Amiens during the First World War, and the second is his granddaughter, Elizabeth Benson, whose 1970s plotline follows her attempts to recover an understanding of Stephen's experience of the war. Faulks developed the novel to bring more public awareness to the experience of war remembered by WWI veterans. Most critics found this effort successful, commenting
Birdsong (novel) his journals, mirrors the actual loss of record and stories from veterans in post-war Britain. Elizabeth's search for that history is a process of recovering that memory in order to gain a greater emotional relationships with her grandfather, to whom she had never felt connected. Writing in the "British Medical Journal", the medical doctor Paul Slade described reading about this investigation of another person's history to illuminate how "superficial" his own patient histories practice had been. Gorra described the novel's split into parallel narratives as the critical fault in the reading experience of the novel. For de Groot, however, the