‘The door of Sebastian Faulks’s fouth, most ambitious novel swings open quietly onto an airy domestic interior. We are in Amiens, where in 1910 a young Englishman without friends or family has taken a room. Stephen Wraysford has been sent by his employer to study the textile trade. His host, Azaire, is a prosperous manufacturer whose second wife Isabelle is a step-mother to adolescent children. As Stephen unpacks, listening to footsteps, shutters pushed back, voices from the garden, we are, in a few atmospheric pages, drawn as surely into the novel as he and Isabelle – all piled-up hair, pale skin, uneasy glances – are drawn into their haunting all-consuming love affair. Conducted in a half-forgotten room it is as inevitable as the pain which attends it, though the path Isabelle chooses is less predicable. What follows is anything but domestic. It is 1916. Stephen has become a lieutenant and France is a battlefield. The First World War is not exactly unvisited territory in fiction but Faulks’s possession of it is so passionate, so total, that it must surely rank as a tour-de-force, engrossing, moving and unforgettable. Stephen himself, lonely and brooding, is both charismatic and enigmatic. Some aspects of his character prove to be false trails, but he exercises fascination throughout, both on the reader and on his companions in the stinking claustrophobia of the trenches … So powerful is this recreated past that you long to call Birdsong perfect’