Birdsong

In Amiens before the First World War, the young Englishman Stephen Wraysford lodges with the Azaire family, enters a secret affair with Isabelle Azaire, and is drawn into the household's tensions and the town's labour disputes. The narrative then follows him onto the Western Front, where he serves among infantry and the men who dig mines under no-man's-land. A later strand follows his granddaughter Elizabeth as she tries to recover what he lived through from remaining papers and people. The novel binds a civilian love story in a French city to the industrial killing of the trenches, without treating the war as a mere backdrop.

Bound in grey/green cloth blocked with a design in cream and black. Black slipcase.