Charlotte Gray: A Novel - Hardcover

Faulks, Sebastian

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 037550169X ISBN 13: 9780375501692

Publisher: Random House, 1999

Synopsis

Faulks's first novel since the extraordinary success of Birdsong is written with the same passion, power and breadth of vision. Set in England and France during the darkest days of World War II, Charlotte Gray, like Birdsong, depicts a complex love affair that is both shaped and thwarted by war.
        
It is 1942. London is blacked out, but France is under a greater darkness, as the occupying Nazi forces encroach ever closer in a tense waiting game. Charlotte Gray, a volatile but determined young woman, travels south from Edinburgh. Working in London, she has a brief but intense love affair with an RAF pilot. When his plane is lost over France, she contrives to go there herself to work in the Resistance and to search for him--but then is unwilling to leave as she finds that the struggle for the country's fate is intimately linked to her own battle to take control of her life.
        
Faulks's novel is an examination of lost paradises, politics without belief, the limits of memory, the redemptive power of art and the existence of hope beyond reason. It is also a brilliant evocation of life in Occupied France and, more significantly, a revelation of the appalling price many Frenchmen paid to survive in unoccupied, so-called Free France. As the men, women and children of Charlotte's small town prepare to meet their terrible destiny, the truth of what took place in wartime France is finally exposed.
        
When private lives and public events fatally collide, the roots of the characters' lives are torn up and exposed. These harrowing scenes are presented with the passion and narrative force that readers will recall from Birdsong. Charlotte Gray will attract even more readers to Faulks's remarkable fiction.

About this title

Review

In his 1996 novel, Birdsong, Sebastian Faulks showed himself to be a superb anatomist of men--and, just as importantly, women--at war. Indeed, his depiction of trench combat during World War I was almost painfully vivid: the equivalent of Wilfred Owen in prose, minus the lingering idealism. Now the author shifts his focus to the next global conflict in Charlotte Gray. This time the year is 1942, when "England was blacked out and afraid." The 25-year-old heroine has just traveled down from Edinburgh to London, hoping to make some contribution to the war effort. In short order she falls in love with a British pilot, mourns his disappearance and apparent death in France, and follows him across the Channel to assist the nascent French Resistance.

On the face of it, these are the ingredients of a historical potboiler. But Faulks is such a gifted storyteller that we seldom notice the threadbare nature of the raw material. Instead, all but the most churlish reader will be drawn into Charlotte's tribulations, which are not merely geopolitical but amorous: "The last thing she needed was some uncontrolled romance. She wanted to be helpful, she wanted to lead a serious life, not to lie sobbing in her bed for a disembodied yearning. Still less did she wish to see it embodied, with the complication and the fear that all that would entail." (Note: Charlotte is that rare thing, a virginal heroine, at least until page 61.) What's more, the author's evocation of Occupied France is a triumph of grimy, monochromatic realism. Here the small triumphs of Charlotte and her circle are expertly offset by the larger tragedies of what we've come to call, with only middling accuracy, the Good War. --William Davies

From the Back Cover

British reviewers' praise for Charlotte Gray:

"It would take a mile-long essay to do justice to the many virtues of Sebastian Faulks's wonderful new novel. This riveting account of a young Scotswoman's odyssey through wartime London, and on into a perilous secret mission in Vichy France, deserves the highest praise. . . . Proustian cogitations, masterful narrative, and zestful pen portraits. A beautiful, near-masterpiece."--The Independent on Sunday

"One of the most impressive novelists of his generation . . . who is growing in authority with every book."
--Sunday Telegraph

"A worthy successor to Birdsong. It is hard to imagine anyone who enjoyed the last novel not finding great interest and pleasure in this one. In Charlotte, Faulks has created a wonderfully complex and engaging heroine, with whom it is hard not to fall a little in love."--Daily Express

"Faulks has the rare gift of being popular and literary at the same time. Its page-turning quality in no way undermines the darkness that it describes."--Literary Review

"Faulks is beyond doubt a master."--Financial Times

Praise for Birdsong:

"Overpowering and beautiful . . . A great novel."--Simon Schama, The New Yorker

"The ordinary superlatives do not suffice in this case. Birdsong moved me more profoundly than anything I've read in years. A deeply compassionate, utterly thrilling work by a master of the form."--Frank Conroy

"Worthy in every way of its honors and success . . . so powerful as to be almost unbearable."--George Garrett, Los Angeles Times Book Review

"A contemporary novel that . . . earns a place on the shelf with true literature. . . . Superb storytelling and craftsmanship."--People

About this edition

• Publisher: Random House
• Publication date: 1999
• ISBN 10: 037550169X
• ISBN 13: 9780375501692
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 399