Extremely well written. Makes one want to study WWI in more detail. Birdsong brings the suffering at the front to the reader at a very human level. I will be reading as much of Faulks as I can.

So well written. Difficult to read at times when they focused on the men in the trenches of war. Great generational saga.

Impresionante, no tengo palabras... más allá de lo conmovedora que resulta la historia, el horror, el instinto de supervivencia, la degradación humana en la que fue la guerra más sangrienta y cruel de la historia, más allá de todo eso, la narración de Faulks, su forma tan humana de contar lo peor, es un maestro.

Reseña aquí

From lovelorn soldiers, knee-deep in French mud, to privileged ladies taking tea in Blighty, Birdsong is a war story that appeals to both sexes. Class war/ real war; there are so many dimensions to this thunderous epic.
Through unaffected prose, Faulks manipulates our emotions in a way that few authors can.
My wife proclaims this to be her most favourite read, and were she to have typed this review, it would have attracted an easy five stars.

Birdsong is one of those few books that haunt you even after you have read the last word. A quote from the first part of the book truly describes its writings. "The function of music is to liberate in the soul those feelings that normally we keep locked up in the heart". This book does the same. It opens up a plethora of emotions experienced by the reader with every passage in the book.
This book focuses on the life of Stephen Wraysford, a World War I veteran, while channeling into the life of his granddaughter Elizabeth Benson, who tries to know more about her grandfather and his war experiences. Faulks sections the novel into seven parts starting with the introduction of a young Stephen Wraysford and his unfulfilled love with Isabella Azaire and concludes with Elizabeth fulfilling her grandfather’s promise made to a certain comrade. Faulks crystal clear writings run smoothly over pages engrossing the reader to feel the heart wrenching emotions of an incomplete love, the psychological effects that a war had on the soldiers and its aftermath. A certain section that touched my heart was the part of the letter writings between the soldiers on the war front and their kin. Makes you wonder how we easily forget those who fight on the brink of death to keep us safe and alive.
It is a truly brave and passionate read. Stephen Wraysford, Isabella Azaire, Jack Firebrace and Michael Weir simply do not seem to leave my memory. I may just revisit them soon.

Faulks should've just stuck with the war descriptions because everything else was terrible, I've read better sex scenes in terrible fan fiction and more complex female characters in John Green's novels.

A very moving and haunting book. It captures the horrors of the first world war in such detail that it will stay with me for a very long time.

On the cover of "Birdsong", it says: A NOVEL OF LOVE AND WAR. 

"Birdsong" really is about those two things, but separately. It is a novel about love. It is a novel about war. The two parts of the book are so different from each other that I found myself wondering how it was still the same book. 

Perhaps this effect was intended. The novel starts off as an ordinary historical romance. We are shown the affair between Stephen Wraysford and Isabelle Azaire. It's the sort of story we are used to, talking about the sort of feelings we are used to. Being in love, feeling angry at the ones who don't understand us, wanting to free ourselves and be with the one we love.

Then we are thrown into the middle of World War I, and we are faced with a completely different set of feelings. Fear of being buried alive under a tunnel deep beneath no man's land. Seeing all the bodies, twisted and rotten beyond recognition. Knowing you have to write a generic letter to their mothers and their widows. Killing one of your own to ease their suffering, praying a wounded soldier will die soon so that he won't have to suffer any more. Carrying the pieces of your own brother home in a bag to be buried. These feelings, they are unnatural, unspeakable, no one should have them. And how can it be possible that Stephen Wraysford, the same Stephen from Book I who had such an ordinary life with such ordinary concerns, is going through all of this.

Most eloquent of all were the photographs. There was one of a moon-faced boy gazing with shattered patience at the camera. This was his life, his actuality, Elizabeth thought, as real to him as business meetings, love affairs; as real as the banal atmosphere of the cross-channel ferry lounge, known to every modern holiday maker in Britain: his terror and imminent death were as actual and irreversible to him as were to her the drink from the bar, the night in the hotel ahead, and all the other fripperies of peacetime life that made up her casual, unstressed existence.

This book is the process of the reader trying to understand who the protagonist Stephen is and what he becomes. We are not told much in the beginning, where we have the main love story. We know that he's an impulsive young man who is lusting after a married woman out of his league. We try to flesh out his character as we go along.

Then there are the parts with Elizabeth, Stephen's granddaughter. The story alternates between WWI and Elizabeth's timeline. Elizabeth is going through Stephen's diaries and trying to piece together her family history and what her grandfather has been through. I thought they were a very nice break from the war storyline, because even though it was brilliant and deeply affecting, I could not handle going through that without any distractions. I liked the character of Elizabeth, I liked how she was honest with herself. 

The love story is not a very solid one, especially the beginning of the affair. It's kind of old fashioned in the sense that these two people only need to know each other for a week to think that they are soulmates. Not to mention that I was a bit bothered by Stephen's... harassment of Isabelle. He relentlessly pursues this woman, not knowing anything about how she feels. He assumes that she must love him too, must be ready to risk her marriage and her comfortable life for this young man she just met. And the crazy thing is, she actually does. This whole relationship is poorly constructed. Why does it begin, why does it end? No one knows.

However, I found the World War I parts of Birdsong very profound and affecting. For me, Birdsong is primarily a war novel.  We are given an insight into the front lines, and the tunnels. We are shown devastating scenes of death and suffering, of deep human sadness, and I think I will keep many with me for the rest of my life. Also the question Stephen asks himself throughout the book: how far will the men be willing to go? When will they say that it's too much?

Now, as he listened, he could hear what Weir had meant: it was a low, continuous moaning. He could not make out any individual pain, but the sound ran down to the river on their left and up over the hill for half a mile or more. As his ear became used to the absence of guns, Stephen could hear it more clearly: it sounded to him as though the earth itself was groaning. 

"Oh God, oh God." Weir began to cry. "What have we done, what have we done? Listen to it. We've done something terrible, we'll never get back to how it was before."

Add me to list of readers who was annoyed and unconvinced by the split-personality of this book. The bit about the war--harrowing and awful, yet so beautifully and carefully written you'll be drawn in inspite of yourself. The bit about the grand-daughter and her lame affair--zzzzzzzzzzzz.

A devastating account of the slaughterhouse that was the trench war of 1914-1918, not only about the loss of innocence, but about the complete destruction of human mind and the impossible task of maintaining a shred of sanity when everybody around you is blown to pieces.
The decision to start the epic with a passionate love story a few years before the war and to end it some 60 years later with a generation that has almost forgot the horror serves well to emphasize the brutality of the trench accounts.
I consider this book, together with Erich Maria Remarque "Am Western Nicht Neues", a necessary read for anybody who thinks war is glamorous or that professional killers are some kind of macho role models.

You might want to think twice about reading Birdsong if you are claustrophobic. Also, reading it just before going to sleep might not be conducive to a restful night. You might consider yourself reasonably well educated about World War I -- about the brutality of trench warfare and the unimaginable loss of life -- but you haven't been there, not in the trenches and especially not in the tunnels that snaked under the battlefields, built by both sides, sometimes within feet of each other, at least not the way Faulks puts you there.

Billed as "a novel of love and war," the novel of love is mediocre at best. The first hundred-plus pages introducing the protagonist and building up to a torrid love affair are mostly tedious and unnecessary. And the intermittent present-day framing device, in which an educated but oblivious young woman suddenly decides to unearth her family's history is worse. But most of the book and certainly the parts that will burn into your brain are about the war. It's almost too painful to read but impossible to put down...the years of carnage, of fear, of filth, the conflict between wanting to live and wanting to die, the inability to even envision a normal life...Faulks's prose is unadorned and unsparing, as if only by stripping the language down to stark essentials can he convey the unspeakable.

Birdsong was published more than twenty years ago. I finally picked it up because in exchange for a review, I was sent Faulks's most recent novel, Where My Heart Used To Beat, his (I think) seventeenth, and I thought it wise to first read the book for which he is best known and lauded. It will be interesting to see which Faulks wrote the new book -- the uninspired love novelist or the superb war novelist.

I so enjoyed this sweeping wartime story. Cathartic and beautiful. A love story and war story all rolled into one. Historical fiction. Really enjoyed this one!!