Sebastian Faulks. (2014). Charlotte Gray. Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group.

Sebastian Faulks. 2014. Charlotte Gray. Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group.

Sebastian Faulks, Charlotte Gray. Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, 2014.

Sebastian Faulks. Charlotte Gray. Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, 2014.

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1. • role: Author
   • fileAs: Faulks, Sebastian
   • bioText: Sebastian Faulks worked as a journalist for fourteen years before taking up writing full-time in 1991. He was voted Author of the Year by the British Book Awards for Birdsong, which was also a New York Times bestseller.  He is best known for his trilogy of novels set in France: The Girl at the Lion d’Or, Birdsong, and Charlotte Gray. He is also the author of Human Traces, On Green Dolphin Street, the Fatal Englishman, Engleby, and the James Bond novel Devil May Care.  He lives in London with his wife and three children.
   • name: Sebastian Faulks

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title

Charlotte Gray

fullDescription

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.

reviews

1. • premium: False
   • source: The Independent on Sunday
   • content: "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."
2. • premium: False
   • source: Sunday Telegraph
   • content: "One of the most impressive novelists of his generation . . . who is growing in authority with every book."
3. • premium: False
   • source: Daily Express
   • content: "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."
4. • premium: False
   • source: Literary Review
   • content: "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."
5. • premium: False
   • source: Financial Times
   • content: "Faulks is beyond doubt a master."
6. • premium: False
   • source: Simon Schama, The New Yorker
   • content: "Overpowering and beautiful . . . A great novel."
7. • premium: False
   • source: Frank Conroy
   • content: "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."
8. • premium: False
   • source: George Garrett, Los Angeles Times Book Review
   • content: "Worthy in every way of its honors and success . . . so powerful as to be almost unbearable."
9. • premium: True
   • source:
   • content:

     February 1, 1999
     Readers of the bestseller Birdsong may hope that Faulks's third novel will furnish another mesmerizing narrative with a piercing love story and the kinds of details that vitalized his descriptions of life in the trenches during WWII. Although this novel does not, sadly, equal its predecessor in terms of seductive readability, its setting in occupied France during WWII and its depiction of the sentiments that motivated many Frenchmen to identify emotionally with the Germans rather than their longtime foe, Britain, grants the story intrinsic interest. But Faulks falters when he asks us to believe that pragmatic young Scotswoman Charlotte Gray is so transformed by her love for RAF airman Peter Gregory that she determines to parachute into France to find him after he disappears on a mission somewhere in the Free Zone. Disguising her motivation, she volunteers for the government's secret G-Section, where her uncanny talent for memorizing documents, her nerves of steel and her equanimity when parachuting into Occupied France after scant training may leave readers incredulous. Even more problematic is Charlotte's sense of transcendent mission, her mystical feeling, stressed again and again, that she has received "a call" to find Peter, and that her work for the Resistance is a "compelling urgency of personal and moral force" that will "change my life.. save my soul... and save soul as well." In evoking the mood and atmosphere of 1942-1943 France, however, Faulks provides the nuanced detail that invests the novel with authenticity, irony and pathos. Charlotte's dangerous maneuvers as she meets Resistance members and integrates herself into the village of Lavaurette, and the alternating chapters that reveal Peter's predicament, are genuinely absorbing. When Faulks introduces two small Jewish boys who are left behind in the village when their parents are deported, their heartrending situation adds tension. Yet Faulks undermines these effective scenes with a plot device that fizzles: veiled hints about Charlotte's "betrayal and violation" by her father when she was a child. Despite the psychological inconsistencies, however, in the end, it is the convincing settings--the wartime London singles scene, the old boy spy network, and daily life in an ideologically and politically divided France--that shape dramatic immediacy.

popularity

49

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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....

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