A child will be born who will change everything.

When a young woman named Talissa answers an advert to carry a child, she cannot begin to imagine the consequences.

Snow Country, tells the story of Lena, a girl born with nothing but her own strength of character to an alcoholic mother in a small town in southern Austria in 1906 and Anton, the restless son of a bourgeois family who sets out to make his fortune in pre-First World War Vienna.

Here is Paris as you have never seen it before – a city in which every building seems to hold the echo of an unacknowledged past, the shadows of Vichy and Algeria.

In this urgent and deeply moving novel, Faulks deals with questions of empire, grievance and identity. With great originality and a dark humour, Paris Echo asks how much we really need to know if we are to live a valuable life.

Robinson Crusoe discovers thousands of ‘half-naked savages’ having it large on Ibiza.

James Bond is on a mission, as a 24-hour call-out plumber.

‘The young stable lad is a moody fellow,’ say reviewers of Wuthering Heights in The Good Hotel Guide.

Hans Christian Andersen gets into the subprime mortgage racket.

Stephen King attempts a love story that doesn’t involve buckets of blood.

Robbie Burns cheers on Andy Murray at Wimbledon.

And Harry Potter is left high and dry when Ginny kicks him out and keeps the house.

Re-mixed and re-imagined, this is literature but not as you know it.

On a small island off the south coast of France, Robert Hendricks, an English doctor who has seen the best and the worst the twentieth century had to offer, is forced to confront the events that made up his life.

His host, and antagonist, is Alexander Pereira, a man whose time is running out, but who seems to know more about his guest than Hendricks himself does.

The search for sanity takes us through the war in Italy in 1944, a passionate love that seems to hold out hope, the great days of idealistic work in the 1960s and finally – unforgettably – back into the trenches of the Western Front.

The recurring themes of Sebastian Faulks’s fiction are here brought together with a new stylistic brilliance as the novel casts a long, baleful light over the century we have left behind but may never fully understand. Daring, ambitious and in the end profoundly moving, this is Faulks’s most remarkable book yet.

An original and illuminating non-fiction anthology of writing on the First World War.

A lieutenant writes of digging through bodies that have the consistency of Camembert cheese; a mother sends flower seeds to her son at the Front, hoping that one day someone may see them grow; a nurse tends a man back to health knowing he will be court-martialled and shot as soon as he is fit.

In this extraordinarily powerful and diverse selection of diaries, letters and memories – many of which have never been published before – privates and officers, seamen and airmen, munitions workers and mothers, nurses and pacifists, prisoners-of-war and conscientious objectors appear alongside each other.

The war involved people from so many different backgrounds and countries and included here are, among others, British, German, Russian and Indian voices. Alongside testament from the many ordinary people whose lives were transformed by the events of 1914-18, there are extracts from names that have become synonymous with the war, such as Siegfried Sassoon and T.E. Lawrence. What unites them is a desire to express something of the horror, the loss, the confusion and the desire to help – or to protest.

A Broken World is an original collection of personal and defining moments that offer an unprecedented insight into the Great War as it was experienced and as it was remembered.

A gloriously witty novel from Sebastian Faulks using P.G. Wodehouse’s much-loved characters, Jeeves and Wooster, fully authorised by the Wodehouse estate.

Terrified, a young prisoner in the Second World War closes his eyes and pictures himself going out to bat on a sunlit cricket ground in Hampshire.

Across the courtyard in a Victorian workhouse, a father is too ashamed to acknowledge his son.

A skinny girl steps out of a Chevy with a guitar; her voice sends shivers through the skull.

Soldiers and lovers, parents and children, scientists and musicians risk their bodies and hearts in search of connection – some key to understanding what makes us the people we become.

Provocative and profound, Sebastian Faulks’s dazzling novel journeys across continents and time to explore the chaos created by love, separation and missed opportunities. From the pain and drama of these highly particular lives emerges a mysterious consolation: the chance to feel your heart beat in someone else’s life.

A compelling and personal look at the British novel through its greatest characters – the heroes, lovers, snobs and villains – by bestselling novelist Sebastian Faulks

A Week in December, Sebastian Faulks’s tenth novel, came out in September 2009 to considerable press attention. Much of it focussed on his attempt to write a ‘state of the nation’ book at a time of economic meltdown and admired the ambition and the execution of the idea. It ‘could hardly be more timely’, said The Times; it is ‘unequivocally successful,’ said the Guardian and ‘perfectly constructed’, according to the Telegraph.

The Independent wrote: ‘Often edgily satirical, sometimes deeply affecting, A Week in December grasps its headline motifs with the strong and supple hands of a master.’

Between 1998 and 2016, Faulks appeared on a light-hearted Radio Four literary quiz show called The Write Stuff, with question master James Walton and opposing team captain John Walsh. Each programme had an author of the week, in whose style the panellists were asked to write a parody on a given theme.

Narrated in the first person by the main character, Mike Engleby, Faulks’s seventh novel is modern, demotic and funny – albeit in a deep shade of black. It’s hard to think of a greater contrast between two successive novels of any contemporary writer than between Human Traces and Engleby.

Faulks shifted location to the United States for his sixth novel, which begins in 1959. It may seem in time to have been a transitional novel. It has a more modern setting than the previous books, yet it also seems concerned to have a final word on the impact of war on individual life in the twentieth century.

This was Faulks’s first and so far only venture into biography. It is a triptych, whose subjects were all men of high promise who died young. They are the painter Christopher Wood (1901-1930), the pilot and author Richard Hillary (1919-1943) and Jeremy Wolfenden (1934-1965), an academic and journalist.

Set during the Second World War, this was the last of Faulks’s French trilogy, following The Girl at the Lion d’Or and Birdsong. It is the most inward-looking of the three books, dealing with themes of memory and loss. The main character’s search for her missing lover in occupied France is set against an uncompromising portrayal of French political life under the German occupation, including French co-operation in the deportation of Jews to Auschwitz. Despite its harrowing subject matter, it has proved one of Faulks’s most popular novels, remains his best seller in hardback and has sold more than a million copies overall in the United Kingdom.

Set in provincial France in 1936, Faulks’s second novel established his reputation and set out the themes that he would deal with for the next ten years.

Anne Louvet arrives to work at the run-down hotel of the title, in Janvilliers, a small coastal town in Brittany. It is clear that she brings with her the secret of a traumatic past. Almost at once, she becomes fascinated by a local lawyer, Hartmann, who lives in a large and derelict house on a headland with his wife Christine.

Faulks’s fourth novel and the second in his French trilogy has become a classic of modern English literature.

It is taught at school and university on both English and History syllabuses; it has sold more than two million copies in the United Kingdom and three million worldwide; it has been used at Sandhurst to instruct young officers in the realities of warfare; in polls it is regularly voted one of the nation’s favourite books.

Faulks’s third novel. The title derives from the old Cockney phonetic joke: A for ’Orses, B for Mutton, C for Yerself, and so on. Each of its 26 chapters is set in a different place; the name of each place begins with a different letter of the alphabet. The structure of the novel is thus not one of linear time, but the apparently random one of alphabetical order.

The main character, Pietro, is English with an Italian mother. He works as a photographer, and there is a snapshot quality to some of the chapters and place descriptions. The dislocation of time and the alphabetic imperative mean that we see him traumatically parting from his lover before we see them meet. ‘I liked the idea of fate that this seemed to bring to their early friendship,’ Faulks said. ‘I also liked it that I was able to resurrect people. Someone who dies in chapter four is healthy and well in chapter 12. I believed this said something about the way we experience time.’

Five years in the research and writing, the epic Human Traces, Faulks’s seventh novel, was, and remains, his most ambitious yet. Its theme is the nature of humanity: the make-up of our conscious minds and what it is that makes humans so perplexingly different from other creatures.

In this anthology, Sebastian Faulks has collected samples of the the best fictional writing about war in the 20th century. From the First World War to the Gulf War, they depict the soldier’s experience from call-up to demobilisation and after. Truly international in scope, the anthology includes writing by Erich Maria Remarque and Pat Barker, Isaac Babel and Ernest Hemingway, Heinrich Böll and Norman Mailer, J.G.Ballard and Tim O’Brien, Julian Barnes and Louis de Bernières. Together, these writers not only evoke the horrors of war, but also illuminate its friendships, quieter moments and unexpected humour.

The anthology was co-edited by German-born Vintage editor, Jörg Hensgen.