Human Traces
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  • Published: 3 July 2006
  • ISBN: 9780099458265
  • Imprint: Vintage
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 800
  • RRP: $26.99

Human Traces

The Sunday Times Bestseller

Formats & editions
Paperback
24 Sep 2024
EBook
13 Jun 2024
EBook
4 Jan 2011
Audiobook
5 Aug 2021
Paperback
3 Jul 2006
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Reissued in new series style to match Faulks's most recent novel Where My Heart Used to Beat, which was a major Sunday Times bestseller in 2016

Discover the moving powerful prequel to Snow Country

'An extraordinary novel of magnificent scope' Evening Standard

As young boys both Jacques Rebière and Thomas Midwinter become fascinated with trying to understand the human mind. As psychiatrists, their quest takes them from the squalor of the Victorian lunatic asylum to the crowded lecture halls of the renowned Professor Charcot in Paris; from the heights of the Sierra Madre in California to the plains of unexplored Africa.

As the concerns of the old century fade and the First World War divides Europe, the two men's volatile relationship develops and changes, but is always tempered by one exceptional woman; Thomas's sister Sonia.

Moving and challenging in equal measure, Human Traces explores the question of what kind of beings men and women really are.

'Shocking and enlightening...touching and affecting' Daily Mail
  • Published: 3 July 2006
  • ISBN: 9780099458265
  • Imprint: Vintage
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 800
  • RRP: $26.99
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About the author

Sebastian Faulks

Sebastian Faulks was born in April 1953. Before becoming a full-time writer in 1991, he worked as a journalist. Sebastian Faulks’s books include A Possible Life, Human Traces, On Green Dolphin Street, Engleby, Birdsong, A Week in December and Where My Heart Used to Beat.

portrait photo of Sebastian Faulks

Also by Sebastian Faulks

The Seventh Son
Snow Country
Paris Echo
Pistache Returns
Birdsong
Where My Heart Used to Beat
Girl At The Lion d'Or
See all

Praise for Human Traces

Faulks is beyond doubt a master

Financial Times

He is the best novelist of his generation

Scotsman

[S]tructurally intricate, yet intensely focused on the lives of individuals...Human Traces is replete with interesting ideas and contains some exceptionally fine topographic writing

Jane Stevenson, Observer

Faulks has woven dozens of compelling voices together to produce an extraordinary novel of magnificent scope

Jonathan Ree, Evening Standard

This is a bold and remarkable work of imagination, particularly in its daring remastery of the 19th-century novel form and the sustained grace of its prose. To write so well for so many hundreds of pages is an amazing feat of intellectual athleticism

Jane Shilling, Sunday Telegraph

An extraordinary novel of magnificent scope

Evening Standard

His most ambitious novel yet... Love, loyalty, courage, compassion, goodness...these are the poles around which his always skilful storytelling revolves

Independent

Shocking and enlightening...touching and affecting

Daily Mail

An epic of a novel...in some ways better than Birdsong, or at least more subtle and far ranging

Country Life

One of the most impressive novelists of his generation

Sunday Telegraph