Audiobooks by Sebastian Faulks

Brought to you by Penguin. A CHILD WILL BE BORN WHO WILL CHANGE EVRYTHING When a young American academic Talissa Adam offers to carry another woman's child, she has no idea of the life-changing consequences. Behind the doors of the Parn Institute, a billionaire entrepreneur plans to stretch the boundaries of ethics as never before. Through a series of IVF treatments, which they hope to keep secret, they propose an experiment that will upend the human race as we know it. Seth, the baby, is delivered to hopeful parents Mary and Alaric, but when his differences start to mark him out from his peers, he begins to attract unwanted attention. The Seventh Son is a spectacular examination of what it is to be human. It asks the question: just because you can do something, does it mean you should? Sweeping between New York, London, and the Scottish Highlands, this is an extraordinary novel about unrequited love and unearned power. Praise for Sebastian Faulks: 'Faulks writes with great emotional authority' SUNDAY TIMES 'Faulks is a prodigiously talented writer' NEW YORK TIMES 'The best novelist of his generation' SCOTSMAN 'Faulks is beyond doubt a master' FINANCIAL TIMES ©2023 Sebastian Faulks (P)2023 Penguin Audio

Sebastian Faulks (Author), Miranda Raison (Narrator)

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Snow Country: SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLER

Brought to you by Penguin. 'A fine and profoundly intelligent novel, written by an author who balances big ideas with human emotion. Wistful, yearning and wise' ELIZABETH DAY 'Faulks's most poignant love story yet' ANTONY BEEVOR, author of Stalingrad 1914: Young Anton Heideck has arrived in Vienna, eager to make his name as a journalist. While working part-time as a private tutor, he encounters Delphine, a woman who mixes startling candour with deep reserve. Entranced by the light of first love, Anton feels himself blessed. Until his country declares war on hers. 1927: For Lena, life with a drunken mother in a small town has been impoverished and cold. She is convinced she can amount to nothing until a young lawyer, Rudolf Plischke, spirits her away to Vienna. But the capital proves unforgiving. Lena leaves her metropolitan dream behind to take a menial job at the snow-bound sanatorium, the Schloss Seeblick. 1933: Still struggling to come terms with the loss of so many friends on the Eastern Front, Anton, now an established writer, is commissioned by a magazine to visit the mysterious Schloss Seeblick. In this place of healing, on the banks of a silvery lake, where the depths of human suffering and the chances of redemption are explored, two people will see each other as if for the first time. Sweeping across Europe as it recovers from one war and hides its face from the coming of another, SNOW COUNTRY is a landmark novel of exquisite yearnings, dreams of youth and the sanctity of hope. In elegant, shimmering prose, Sebastian Faulks has produced a work of timeless resonance. 'Overpowering and beautiful ... Ambitious, outrageous, poignant, sleep-disturbing' SIMON SCHAMA on Birdsong © Sebastian Faulks 2021 (P) Penguin Audio 2021

Sebastian Faulks (Author), Tania Rodrigues (Narrator)

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The Fatal Englishman: Three Short Lives

Brought to you by Penguin. Christopher Wood, a beautiful young Englishman, decided to be the greatest painter the world had seen. He went to Paris in 1921. By day he studied, by night he attended the parties of the beau monde. He knew Picasso, worked for Diaghilev and was a friend of Cocteau. In the last months of his 29-year life, he fought a ravening opium addiction to succeed in claiming a place in history of English painting. Richard Hilary, confident, handsome and unprincipled, flew Spitfires in the Battle of Britain before being shot down and horribly burned. He underwent several operations by the legendary plastic surgeon, A H McIndoe. His account of his experiences, The Last Enemy, made him famous, but not happy. He begged to be allowed to return to flying, and died mysteriously in a night training operation, aged 23. Jeremy Wolfenden was born in 1936, the son of Jack, later Lord Wolfenden. Charming, generous and witty, he was the cleverest Englishman of his generation, but left All Souls to become a hack reporter. At the height of the Cold War, he was sent to Moscow where his louche private life made him the plaything of the intelligence services. A terrifying sequence of events ended in Washington where he died at the age of 31. © Sebastian Faulks 1996 (P) Penguin Audio 2021

Sebastian Faulks (Author), James Wilby (Narrator)

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Paris Echo

Random House presents the audiobook edition of Paris Echo by Sebastian Faulks, read by Elham Ehsas and Deborah McBride. Here is Paris as you have never seen it before - a city in which every building seems to hold the echo of an unacknowledged past, the shadows of Vichy and Algeria. American postdoctoral researcher Hannah and runaway Moroccan teenager Tariq have little in common, yet both are susceptible to the daylight ghosts of Paris. Hannah listens to the extraordinary witness of women who were present under the German Occupation; in her desire to understand their lives and through them her own, she finds a city bursting with clues and connections. Out in the migrant suburbs, Tariq is searching for a mother he barely knew. For him in his innocence each boulevard, Métro station and street corner is a source of surprise. In this urgent and deeply moving novel, Faulks deals with questions of empire, grievance and identity. With great originality and a dark humour, Paris Echo asks how much we really need to know if we are to live a valuable life. 'Faulks is beyond doubt a master' Financial Times 'Faulks captures the voice of a century' Sunday Times 'The most impressive novelist of his generation' Sunday Telegraph

Sebastian Faulks (Author), Deborah Mcbride, Elham Ehsas (Narrator)

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Where My Heart Used to Beat

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 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.

Sebastian Faulks (Author), David Sibley (Narrator)

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Jeeves and the Wedding Bells

Bertie Wooster (a young man about town) and his butler Jeeves (the very model of the modern manservant) return in their first new novel in nearly forty years: Jeeves and the Wedding Bells by Sebastian Faulks. P.G. Wodehouse documented the lives of the inimitable Jeeves and Wooster for nearly sixty years, from their first appearance in 1915 (Extricating Young Gussie”) to the his final completed novel (Aunts Aren't Gentlemen) in 1974. These two were the finest creations of a novelist widely proclaimed to be the finest comic English writer by critics and fans alike. Now, forty years later, Bertie and Jeeves return in a hilarious affair of mix-ups and mishaps. With the approval of the Wodehouse estate, acclaimed novelist Sebastian Faulks brings these two back to life for their legion of fans. Bertie, nursing a bit of heartbreak over the recent engagement of one Georgina Meadowes to someone not named Wooster, agrees to help” his old friend Peregrine Woody” Beeching, whose own romance is foundering. That this means an outing to Dorset, away from an impending visit from Aunt Agatha, is merely an extra benefit. Almost immediately, things go awry and the simple plan quickly becomes complicated. Jeeves ends up impersonating one Lord Etringham, while Bertie pretends to be Jeeves' manservant Wilberforce,” and this all happens under the same roof as the now affianced Ms. Meadowes. From there the plot becomes even more hilarious and convoluted, in a brilliantly conceived, seamlessly written comic work worthy of the master himself.

Sebastian Faulks (Author), Julian Rhind-Tutt (Narrator)

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Jeeves and the Wedding Bells

A gloriously witty novel from Sebastian Faulks using P.G. Wodehouse's much-loved characters, Jeeves and Wooster, fully authorised by the Wodehouse estate. Bertie Wooster, recently returned from a very pleasurable soujourn in Cannes, finds himself at the stately home of Sir Henry Hackwood in Dorset. Bertie is more than familiar with the country house set-up: he is a veteran of the cocktail hour and, thanks to Jeeves, his gentleman's personal gentleman, is never less than immaculately dressed. On this occasion, however, it is Jeeves who is to be seen in the drawing room while Bertie finds himself below stairs - and he doesn't care for it at all. Love, as so often, is at the root of the confusion. Bertie, you see, has met Georgiana on the Côte d'Azur. And though she is clever and he has a reputation for foolish engagements, it looks as though this could be the real thing. However, Georgiana is the ward of Sir Henry Hackwood and, in order to maintain his beloved Melbury Hall, the impoverished Sir Henry has struck a deal that would see Georgiana becoming Mrs Rupert Venables. Meanwhile, Peregrine 'Woody' Beeching, one of Bertie's oldest chums, is desperate to regain the trust of his fiancée Amelia, Sir Henry's tennis-mad daughter. But why would this necessitate Bertie having to pass himself off as a servant when he has never so much as made a cup of tea? Could it be that the ever-loyal, Spinoza-loving Jeeves has an ulterior motive? Evoking the sunlit days of a time gone by, Jeeves and the Wedding Bells is a delightfully witty story of mistaken identity, a midsummer village festival, a cricket match and love triumphant. 'At two memorable moments in Jeeves and the Wedding Bells I did indeed laugh until I cried... Jeeves and the Wedding Bells is a masterpiece... Faulks's plot is bang on-message... Faulks captures perfectly both the tone and the spirit of Wodehouse's originals... This is a pitch-perfect undertaking: proof, almost a century after his debut, that Jeeves may not be so inimitable after all.' Matthew Dennison, The Spectator

Sebastian Faulks (Author), Julian Rhind-Tutt (Narrator)

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A Possible Life

In Second World War Poland, a prisoner closes his eyes and pictures a sunlit cricket ground. Across the yard of a Victorian poorhouse, a man is too ashamed to acknowledge the son he gave away. In a 19th-century French village, an old servant understands the meaning of the Bible story her master is reading. In the Catskills, 1971, a girl steps out of a Chevy with a song that will send shivers through her listeners' skulls. A few years from now, in Italy, a scientist discovers links between time and the human brain, and her lover's novel and his life. Throughout five masterpieces of fiction, exquisitely drawn and unforgettable characters risk their bodies, hearts and minds in pursuit of the manna of human connection.

Sebastian Faulks (Author), Sian Thomas (Narrator)

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A Possible Life

Terrified, a young prisoner in the Second World War closes his eyes and pictures himself going out to bat on a sunlit cricket ground in Hampshire. Across the courtyard in a Victorian workhouse, a father too ashamed to acknowledge his son. A skinny girl steps out of a Chevy with a guitar; her voice sends shivers through the skull. Soldiers and lovers, parents and children, scientists and musicians risk their bodies and hearts in search of connection - some key to understanding what makes us the people we become. Provocative and profound, Sebastian Faulks's dazzling novel journeys across continents and time to explore the chaos created by love, separation and missed opportunities. From the pain and drama of these highly particular lives emerges a mysterious consolation: the chance to feel your heart beat in someone else's life.

Sebastian Faulks (Author), Christian Rodska, Lucy Briers, Rupert Degas, Samuel West, Sian Thomas (Narrator)

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Girl At The Lion d'Or

A beautifully controlled and powerful story of love and conscience, will and desire which begins when a mysterious young girl arrives to take up a post at the seedy H-tel du Lion d'Or in a small French town in the mid-1930s. The Girl at the Lion d'Or is the first book in Sebastian Faulks' French trilogy of novel. Birdsong and Charlotte Gray are also available from Random House Audio Books, read by Samuel West.

Sebastian Faulks (Author), James Wilby (Narrator)

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Birdsong

Set before and during the great war, Birdsong captures the drama of that era on both a national and a personal scale. It is the story of Stephen, a young Englishman, who arrives in Amiens in 1910. His life goes through a series of traumatic experiences, from the clandestine love affair that tears apart the family with whom he lives, to the unprecedented experiences of the war itself.

Sebastian Faulks (Author), Peter Firth (Narrator)

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A Fool's Alphabet

Sebastian Faulks (Author), Jamie Glover (Narrator)

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