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) novel often focus on the fluid reading experience as well as the novel's effective treatment of "'real' people" within the trauma of war. Gorra describes the novel as mostly a strong WWI novel, characterising it as "superb" with prose that is "spare and precise". The review published in "Kirkus Reviews" was glowing: "Once more, Faulks shows his unparalleled strengths as a writer of plain human life and high, high compassion. A wonderful book, ringing with truth." Consistently one of the greatest critiques of the novel concerns its 1970s plot-line. For example, Gorra found that the addition of a parallel narrative