Sebastian Faulks has published relatively few novels but has established a solid reputation. With the enormous critical and popular success of his 1993 novel, Birdsong, he vaulted to the front rank of writers born since 1950. Following a career as a literary journalist and three well-received literary novels, he made his mark with a book called by Wilder Penfield in the Toronto Sun (29 June 1996) “a wildly acclaimed epic novel” and by Louise Baring in Vogue ( July 1995) “the most erotic book” she had ever read. In a country where, as Anthony Beevor suggested in the Electronic Telegraph (22 August 1998), “the idea of a popular literary novel still sounds like a contradiction in terms,” he has become the most highly visible author—and beneficiary—of this anomalous category. Faulks's 1998 novel, Charlotte Gray, completes a loose trilogy that includes Birdsong and begins with his second novel, The Girl at the Lion d'Or (1989).

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