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) human endurance" and explore the effect of carnage on the psyche. A reviewer for "Kirkus Reviews" also highlighted this theme, writing that "the war, here, is Faulks's real subject, his stories of destroyed lives, however wrenching, only throwing its horror into greater relief and making it the more unbearable". The contemporary historian Simon Wessley describes the novel, alongside Barker's "Regeneration", as an exemplar of contemporary fiction which uses the experience of the World War I trenches to examine more contemporary understandings of PTSD. De Groot argues that this reinvestigation of a traumatic history mirrors a growing interest among both literary