SEBASTIAN FAULKS (b.1953)
Birdsong. London: Hutchinson, 1993.
‘Birdsong is an operatic book’: signed first edition of Faulks’s deeply moving portrait of the experience of war, annotated with 848 words by the author. Faulks’s marginalia concern various aspects of the novel’s composition and its hugely successful afterlife, from the influence of writers such as Zola, Owen, Proust, and Conrad, to the textual changes between editions and the favourite lines of readers. The author also carefully describes the sources that informed his writing on the war, from a casual remark about the wartime history of a French village to a moving letter held at the Imperial War Museum, in which ‘the dissonance between the horror and the sentimentality […] seemed just right’.

Octavo. Original green cloth, silver lettering to spine, pictorial dust jacket (corners slightly bumped, mild soiling).

Buyer’s premium is payable, with a significant portion donated by Christie’s to English PEN, but note that no VAT is payable on hammer price or buyer’s premium.
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