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) "[ran] into problems"—especially concerning Elizabeth Benson, whom he "stopped believing in [as a] character". Unlike other reviewers, the critic Sarah Belo did not question the historical investigation plot, but the depiction of Elizabeth's experience as a 1970s woman in England. On the other hand, almost all of the reviewers describe the novel's war sections as excellently written; for example, the review in the "Los Angeles Times" called the sections "so powerful as to be almost unbearable". The novel has been favourably compared to other World War I and II novels, including "All Quiet on the Western Front", "The Young Lions"