Sebastian Faulks Books in Order

When Talissa volunteers as a surrogate for a billionaire‑backed fertility project, she unknowingly agrees to carry a child created with experimental gene editing. As the boy, Seth, grows up extraordinary but not quite understood, the novel asks unsettling questions about science, power and belonging.

In this companion to Human Traces, aspiring journalist Anton Heideck and impoverished Austrian girl Lena are drawn together by circumstance and the psychiatric clinic Schloss Seeblick. Moving between 1914 and the 1930s, the novel links love, trauma and changing ideas about the mind.

Part of the Vintage Minis series, War selects powerful extracts from Faulks’s novels about conflict, including scenes from Birdsong, A Possible Life and A Week in December. Soldiers, civilians and a would‑be bomber each face fear, duty and the aftermath of violence.

In present‑day Paris, American researcher Hannah rents a room to Tariq, a teenage Moroccan who has slipped into the city illegally. As she listens to recordings of women who lived through the Occupation and he roams the banlieues, both are changed by the city’s layered past.

Robert Hendricks, a successful but emotionally numb psychiatrist in 1980s London, is invited to a French island by elderly neurologist Alexander Pereira. There he is pushed to confront his childhood, his wartime experiences in Italy and the great love he lost but never escaped.

This illustrated volume from the National Portrait Gallery uses paintings and photographs to tell the story of the First World War through faces rather than battles. Generals, nurses, poets and ordinary soldiers appear side by side, with essays reflecting on memory and representation.

This short work returns to Jack Firebrace from Birdsong, following him and his fellow tunnellers beneath the Western Front. As they dig under no man’s land, facing cave‑ins and gas, Jack clings to letters from home and the fragile hope of survival.

Edited with historian Hope Wolf, A Broken World gathers letters, diaries and memoirs from people who lived through the First World War. Voices from soldiers, nurses, civilians and objectors reveal horror, boredom, courage and protest in their own words.

In this authorised homage to P. G. Wodehouse, Bertie Wooster agrees to pose as a valet while Jeeves takes an upstairs role at a country‑house house party. Their swapped positions entangle them in broken engagements, financial scrapes and a very precarious wedding.

Composed of five interlinked novellas, A Possible Life moves from a Victorian workhouse and a wartime prison camp to modern science labs and the 1970s music scene. Each story explores how chance, love and memory shape identity, and how one life can echo through another.

This second Pistache collection offers fresh parodies and playful squibs, recasting well‑known authors and characters in wildly inappropriate settings. It’s a light, fast read for dipping into whenever you want a sharp, literate joke at literature’s expense.

Part literary history, part personal essay, Faulks on Fiction looks at British novels through their characters rather than their authors. Organised into heroes, lovers, snobs and villains, it offers lively readings of classic figures and reflections on why they still matter.

Set in London over one week in December 2007, this novel follows a hedge‑fund star, troubled teenager, radicalised student, footballer, Tube driver and barrister whose lives intersect at an extravagant dinner party just as financial crisis and a terror plot converge.

Written to mark Ian Fleming’s centenary, this James Bond adventure sends 007 to investigate chemist Julius Gorner, whose empire masks a plot involving industrial‑scale heroin and a provocation between superpowers. Set in 1967, it recreates classic Bond danger, glamour and Cold War unease.

Engleby is narrated by Mike Engleby, a scholarship boy from a brutal boarding school who wins a place at a prestigious university. As a fellow student disappears and his own memories prove unreliable, the novel becomes a chilling portrait of isolation, obsession and self‑deception.

Based on radio pastiches written for a literary quiz show, Pistache is a pocket collection of comic pieces in which Faulks playfully imitates famous authors and genres. It’s a quick, witty dip into nursery rhymes, fairy tales and classics turned on their heads.

This sweeping novel follows Thomas Midwinter and Jacques Rebière, two young doctors who dream of understanding madness and healing the mind. From Victorian asylums to an ambitious sanatorium in the Austrian mountains, their work, friendships and families are tested by science, faith and impending war.

In late‑1950s Washington, diplomat’s wife Mary van der Linden is torn between her loyal, hard‑drinking husband Charlie and charismatic American reporter Frank Renzo. Their affair plays out against Cold War paranoia, civil‑rights tensions and the lingering cost of past wars.

This anthology, edited by Sebastian Faulks with Jörg Hensgen, gathers twentieth‑century war stories from around the world. From call‑up to demobilisation, the pieces capture battle, comradeship, leave and long‑term scars in vivid, concentrated episodes.

A companion volume to War Stories, this collection assembles classic and lesser‑known fiction about twentieth‑century conflicts. Novel extracts and short stories move from the trenches and U‑boats to Korea and Vietnam, revealing heroism, horror and dark humour.

In 1942, young Scottish woman Charlotte Gray is recruited by a British special operations unit and parachuted into occupied France. While helping the Resistance, she secretly searches for her missing RAF lover and confronts the compromises and betrayals of Vichy France.

This multiple biography examines three gifted men who died young: painter Christopher Wood, Battle of Britain pilot Richard Hillary and journalist Jeremy Wolfenden. Through their brief lives, Faulks explores twentieth‑century Britain’s pressures, ideals and quiet failures.

Birdsong intertwines Stephen Wraysford’s passionate pre‑war love affair in northern France with his later service as an officer in the First World War tunnels. Decades on, his granddaughter uncovers his notebooks and tries to understand the trauma and courage that reshaped her family.

A Fool's Alphabet traces photographer Pietro Russell's life in twenty‑six alphabetically arranged chapters, moving between Italian battlefields, English suburbs and far‑flung assignments. As love, grief and breakdown puncture his travels, the book pieces together how one ordinary man is shaped by family and history.

Set in a small Breton town in the 1930s, this novel follows Anne Louvet, a young waitress with a hidden past who begins an affair with married lawyer Charles Hartmann. Their fragile love unfolds against gathering political storms in pre‑war France.

Faulks’s first novel follows George Grillet, a young French wine trader on compassionate leave in London. Asked to steal an apparently harmless cassette from a Docklands warehouse, he stumbles into a murky world of political extremism and personal danger he barely understands.