The 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, the setting of one of Faulks’s most loved and admired nove...