ID 794296
Lot 35 | SEBASTIAN FAULKS (b.1953)
Estimate value
£ 3 000 – 5 000
Birdsong. London: Hutchinson, 1993.
‘Birdsong is an operatic book’: signed first edition of Faulks’s deeply moving portrait of the experience of war, annotated with 848 words by the author. Faulks’s marginalia concern various aspects of the novel’s composition and its hugely successful afterlife, from the influence of writers such as Zola, Owen, Proust, and Conrad, to the textual changes between editions and the favourite lines of readers. The author also carefully describes the sources that informed his writing on the war, from a casual remark about the wartime history of a French village to a moving letter held at the Imperial War Museum, in which ‘the dissonance between the horror and the sentimentality […] seemed just right’.
Octavo. Original green cloth, silver lettering to spine, pictorial dust jacket (corners slightly bumped, mild soiling).
| Place of origin: | United Kingdom |
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| Auction house category: | Printed books |
| Place of origin: | United Kingdom |
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| Auction house category: | Printed books |
| Address of auction |
CHRISTIE'S 8 King Street, St. James's SW1Y 6QT London United Kingdom | |
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| Phone | +44 (0)20 7839 9060 | |
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| Conditions of purchase | Conditions of purchase |





