Sebastian Faulks's Blog, page 3

Sebastian Faulks talks with Waterstones about reckoning with history, creating characters and why Paris is a city he loves to write about

 

The post Sebastian Faulks talks with Waterstones appeared first on Sebastian Faulks.

Three years ago, Sebastian Faulks was in Los Angeles when he felt the call of Paris.

“I had this feeling that there was something for me there,” he tells me over coffee in central London.

“I wanted to go and immerse myself in the city so, in spring 2016, I went there for two months. I had an idea for a novel about one character who looks at Paris through ignorant eyes and another character who is well-informed. I walked the streets and travelled on the Metro, imagining I was my characters and...

Sam Leith talk to Sebastian Faulks about his brilliant new novel Paris Echo, which describes the twined stories of a Moroccan teenager and an American academic in the French capital – and the way that the ghosts of the past, from the Occupation to the decolonisation of North Africa, still play out in the present.

Listen to the podcast here.

The post Sebastian Faulks’ ghosts of Paris with Sam Leith for The Spectator appeared first on Sebastian Faulks.

The author’s fourteenth novel takes him back to the sensual city of his youth. He’s haunted by echoes of the past.

Read the interview here. (Note: Requires a subscription)

The post The Times interview: Sebastian Faulks on the inspiration behind his new novel, Paris Echo appeared first on Sebastian Faulks.

Sebastian Faulks was invited in to talk about his latest novel, Paris Echo – plus a Q&A about his reading habits.

Listen to the podcast here.

The post Simon Mayo Books of the Year podcast appeared first on Sebastian Faulks.

Announcing Sebastian’s new novel Paris Echo

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.

American postdoctoral researcher Hannah and runaway Moroccan teenager Tariq have little in common, yet both are susceptible to the daylight ghosts of Paris. Hannah listens to the extraordinary witness of women who were present under the German Occupation; in her desire to understand their...

Sebastian’s new novel Where My Heart Used to Beat, will be published by Hutchinson on 10 September 2015.

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...

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...

What first drew you to France? Why are so many of your books set there?

This answer transcribed from tape recorder, April 2008

The first time I went to France was when I was eight, on holiday with my family, and I remember driving in a Citroën DS, a very beautiful car, from the airport. And we stayed in Deauville, which was an old-fashioned resort in Normandy, in a boarding house. It was very much Monsieur Hulot country. Very nice food, rather formal and there was something, I suppose, about...

Is the character of Charlotte Gray based on a real-life Second World War agent?

No. no. no! I don’t do ‘based on’. I am a novelist. I make things. Here is an article I wrote for the Times when a real agent, Nancy Wake, died in 2011…

Nancy Wake, the SOE agent who has just died, was a formidable woman whose exploits in France were celebrated by French, British and American governments. She was a brave, cussed, outspoken, indomitable person. What she was not was the ‘model for’ my fictional char...