An action-packed, cracking good read

If there was a Booker for explosive alternative history techno-thrillers with guts and brains, it would be a cinch

An excellent page-turner

An overpowering and beautiful novel... Ambitious, outrageous, poignant, sleep-disturbing, Birdsong is not a perfect novel, just a great one

Engrossing, moving, and unforgettable

This is a great love story

One of the finest novels of the last forty years

This is literature at its very best: a book with the power to reveal the unimagined, so that one's life is set in a changed context. I urge you to read it

So powerful is this recreated past that you long to call Birdsong perfect

A powerful novel that is difficult to put down

My favourite novel of all time because it’s not just the most moving First World War story, it also has a wonderful romance

It broke my heart.

Magnificent. A classic that everyone should have read.

A sweeping historical drama, it’s also erotic, poignant and tear-inducing. I read it and wept buckets. I don’t think anything else Faulks has written before or since surpasses the brilliance of this one.

This is literature at its very best. A book with the power to reveal the unimagined, so that one’s life is set in a changed context. I urge you to read it.

While marked by poppy wearing and memorial ceremonies, the First World War is also sustained through family history, handed down from one generation to the next. No book better articulates the impact of this narrative than Stephen Faulks’ Birdsong.

A truly amazing read

I’d never read such descriptive literature, and couldn’t sleep at night for thinking about what I’d just read. His [Faulks] portrayal of terror on the battlefield is so powerful

My all-time favourite book