The forthcoming novel, 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.

Their lives become fatally entwined at the Schloss Seeblick, setting of one of Faulks’s most loved and admired novel, Human Traces (2005). Although we glimpse one or two characters from the past, th...