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 us through the war in Italy in 1944, a passionate love that seems
to hold out hope, the great days of idealistic work in the 1960s and finally –
unforgettably – back into the trenches of the Western Front. The recurring
themes of Sebastian Faulks’s fiction are here brought together with a new
stylistic brilliance as the novel casts a long, baleful light over the century
we have left behind but may never fully understand. Daring, ambitious and in
the end profoundly moving, this is Faulks’s most remarkable book yet.
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 us through the war in Italy in 1944, a passionate love that seems
to hold out hope, the great days of idealistic work in the 1960s and finally –
unforgettably – back into the trenches of the Western Front. The recurring
themes of Sebastian Faulks’s fiction are here brought together with a new
stylistic brilliance as the novel casts a long, baleful light over the century
we have left behind but may never fully understand. Daring, ambitious and in
the end profoundly moving, this is Faulks’s most remarkable book yet.
