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. Among the tangled minutiae of human connection, Faulks laces the political and social upheaval of Europe in the first 30 years of the last century.

Snow Country by Sebastian Faulks review — a blizzard of big ideas Snow Country by Sebastian Faulks review — a blizzard of big ideas

In SNOW COUNTRY the backdrop is the great sweep of early 20th-century history and the big debates underway in politics and psychology.Faulks was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 1993 and appointed CBE for services to literature in 2002. Whilst at Cambridge he participated in University Challenge, in which Emmanuel College lost in the opening round. Faulks’s committed fans will be left looking forward to the next instalment of this thought-provoking trilogy. Fans of Faulks will find many of his trademark qualities in his new book: lucid prose, a keen interest in psychiatry, a sure touch in affairs of the heart … well-crafted piece, full of shrewd insights.

Snow Country by Sebastian Faulks | Waterstones Snow Country by Sebastian Faulks | Waterstones

The horrors of what he sees, the huge losses that include friends, leaves him unsurprisingly with PTSD, finding it hard to come to terms with the loss of Delphine, exacerbated by not knowing whether she is alive or dead. So one day I drove to Crowthorne in east Berkshire to meet Dr Gwen Adshead, who said she would show me round and answer questions if I gave a class in creative writing. Sebastian Faulks has written nineteen books, of which A Week in December and The Fatal Englishman were number one in the Sunday Times bestseller lists.Amongst the cast, Lena appealed to me most: she’d led such a tough life, struggling to find anything at all to latch on to – could it be that there would at least be a happy ending for her?

Snow Country - Sebastian Faulks

It is rare and fascinating for a novelist to nurse an idea for so many years while writing other generally admirable but very different novels in the interval. Pioneers in psychiatric medicine, they come together to open a sanatorium, the Schloss Seeblick, on a lakeside in Carinthia, part of modern-day Austria. Their lives move apart over the years but come together again in 1934 at the atmospheric snow-capped sanatorium Schloss Seeblick, where human suffering is laid painfully bare but there remains a chance to rebuild broken lives. His father was a decorated soldier (he won the Military Cross), who later became a solicitor and circuit judge. As the dark clouds of war mass on the horizon, Anton Heideck, an aspiring journalist in Vienna, meets Delphine, a French woman several years his senior, and falls deeply in love.

Human Traces is a novel of ideas in the 19th-century tradition, a sweeping epic that tackles big questions about the nature of cognition and the human predisposition to madness. The sixth child of a drunk and chaotic mother and the only one not to be given up at birth to the local orphanage, Lena is torn between her hunger for love and her determination to take control of her own life. Sweeping across a fragile and frightening Europe precariously placed between two wars, Snow Country is the kind of book that sucks you into its world, with its elegant prose, superbly paced narrative and tantalising glimpses of a better world.