Published to international critical and popular acclaim, this intensely romantic yet stunningly realistic novel spans three generations and the unimaginable gulf between the First World War and the present. As the young Englishman Stephen Wraysford passes through a tempestuous love affair with Isabelle Azaire in France and enters the dark, surreal world beneath the trenches of No Man's Land, Sebastian Faulks creates a world of fiction that is as tragic as A Farewell to Arms and as sensuous as The English Patient. Crafted from the ruins of war and the indestructibility of love, Birdsong is a novel that will be read and marveled at for years to come....

Each guide comprises three sections: an Introduction, which outlines the aims of the guide, the relevant exam board specification and Assessment Objectives Text Guidance, which gives coverage of key aspects of the text Questions and Answers, which focuses on the various types of essay questions and offers specifmen plans and sample answers, together with mark schemes...

Bond is back in this electrifying new novel of intrigue and suspense. A masterful continuation of the James Bond legacy, Devil May Care picks up right where Ian Fleming left off—at the height of the Cold War, with a story of almost unbearable tension.

An Algerian drug runner is brutally executed on the desolate outskirts of Paris and Bond is assigned a new task; to shadow the mysterious Dr. Julius Gorner, a power-crazed pharmaceutical magnate. Gorner has lately taken a disquieting interest in opiate derivatives, both legal and illegal. After finding a willing accomplice in the shape of a glamorous Parisian named Scarlett Papava, Bond must stop a chain of events that could lead to global catastrophe. Charged with adrenaline, deception, and Bond's signature wit, Faulks brings us this exhilarating new chapter in the life of the world's most iconic spy....

Bond is back in this electrifying new novel of intrigue and suspense.

An Algerian drug runner is brutally executed on the desolate outskirts of Paris and 007 is assigned a new task; to shadow the mysterious Dr. Julius Gorner, a power-crazed pharmaceutical magnate. Alongside a glamorous Parisian named Scarlett Papava, Bond must stop a chain of events that will lead to global catastrophe....

Sixteen-year-old Jacques Rebière is living a humble life in rural France, studying butterflies and frogs by candlelight in his bedroom. Across the Channel, in England, the playful Thomas Midwinter, also sixteen, is enjoying a life of ease and is resigned to follow his father's wishes to pursue a career in medicine. A fateful seaside meeting four years later sets the two young men on a profound course of friendship and discovery; they will become pioneers in the burgeoning field of psychiatry. But when a female patient at the doctors' Austrian sanatorium becomes dangerously ill, the two men's conflicting diagnoses threaten to divide them and to undermine all their professional achievements....

Sixteen-year-old Jacques Rebière is living a humble life in rural France, studying butterflies and frogs by candlelight in his bedroom. Across the Channel, in England, the playful Thomas Midwinter, also sixteen, is enjoying a life of ease-and is resigned to follow his father's wishes and pursue a career in medicine.

A fateful seaside meeting four years later sets the two young men on a profound course of friendship and discovery; they will become pioneers in the burgeoning field of psychiatry. But when a female patient at the doctors' Austrian sanatorium becomes dangerously ill, the two men's conflicting diagnosis threatens to divide them--and to undermine all their professional achievements. From the bestselling author of Birdsong comes this masterful novel that ventures to answer challenging questions of consciousness and science, and what it means to be human....

Bond is back. With a vengeance. Devil May Care is an electrifying new chapter in the life of the most iconic spy of literature and film, written to celebrate the centenary of Ian Fleming’s birth on May 28, 1908.

An Algerian drug runner is savagely executed in the desolate outskirts of Paris. This seemingly isolated event leads to the recall of Agent 007 from his sabbatical in Rome and his return to the world of intrigue and danger where he is most at home. The head of MI6, M, assigns him to shadow the mysterious Dr. Julius Gorner, a power-crazed pharmaceutical magnate, whose wealth is exceeded only by his greed. Gorner has lately taken a disquieting interest in opiate derivatives, both legal and illegal, and this urgently bears looking into.

Bond finds a willing accomplice in the shape of a glamorous Parisian named Scarlett Papava. He will need her help in a life-and-death struggle with his most dangerous adversary yet, as a chain of events threatens to lead to global catastrophe. A British airliner goes missing over Iraq. The thunder of a coming war echoes in the Middle East. And a tide of lethal narcotics threatens to engulf a Great Britain in the throes of the social upheavals of the late sixties.

Picking up where Ian Fleming left off, Sebastian Faulks takes Bond back to the height of the Cold War–but also shows Bond facing dangers with a powerful relevance to our own times....

From the critically acclaimed, bestselling author of Birdsong, new fiction about love and war―five transporting stories and five unforgettable lives, linked across centuries. In Second World War Poland, a young prisoner closes his eyes and pictures going to bat on a sunlit English cricket ground. Across the yard of a Victorian poorhouse, a man is too ashamed to acknowledge the son he gave away. In a 19th-century French village, an old servant understands―suddenly and with awe―the meaning of the Bible story her master is reading to her. On a summer evening in the Catskills in 1971, a skinny girl steps out of a Chevy with a guitar and with a song that will send shivers through her listeners' skulls. A few years from now, in Italy, a gifted scientist discovers links between time and the human brain and between her lover's novel and his life. Throughout the five masterpieces of fiction that make up A Possible Life, exquisitely drawn and unforgettable characters risk their bodies, hearts and minds in pursuit of the manna of human connection. Between soldier and lover, parent and child, servant and master, and artist and muse, important pleasures and pains are born of love, separations and missed opportunities. These interactions―whether successful or not―also affect the long trajectories of characters' lives. Provocative and profound, Sebastian Faulks's dazzling new novel journeys across continents and centuries not only to entertain with superb old-fashioned storytelling but to show that occasions of understanding between humans are the one thing that defines us―and that those moments, however fluid, are the one thing that endures. ...

From Thomas Hardy's football report to Dan Brown's visit to the cash dispenser, the work of the great and the not-so-great is here sent up with little hope of coming down. Most of these pieces began their life on Radio Four's The Write Stuff, but have been retooled for the printed page. Others, such as Martin Amis's first day at Hogwarts, have been written specially for this collection. Philip Larkin's Lines in Celebration of the Queen Mother's 115th Birthday, first banned, then cut by the BBC, appears in its entirety for the first time. This is not a book for the faint-hearted or the downstairs lavatory. It is a book for the bedside table of someone you cannot live without....