Snow Country

By: Sebastian Faulks

Narrated by: Tania Rodrigues

Length: 12 hrs and 9 mins

Publisher's summary

The spectacular, sweeping new novel from the internationally acclaimed author of Birdsong and Human Traces.

Looking back to the Vienna of Klimt and Freud and forward to the shadow that is starting to fall over Europe, Sebastian Faulks' new novel is an intensely personal story that focuses on Lena, a spirited girl born with nothing, and Anton, a man of passion and self-doubt.

Lena was born with nothing but her own strength of character to an alcoholic mother in a small town in southern Austria in 1906. Anton is the restless son of a bourgeois family who sets out to make his fortune in pre-First World War Vienna. Their lives become fatally entwined at the Schloss Seeblick in 1933, with Europe precariously placed between two wars.

This novel looks at yearning and desire, at memories true and false, and at how the most private moments of our lives are shaped by the invisible forces of history. Thematically complex, it is held together by a narrative that drives to an unforgettable ending.

©2021 Sebastian Faulks (P)2021 Bond Street Books

Critic reviews

Longlisted for the 2022 Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction

"A fine and profoundly intelligent novel, written by an author who balances big ideas with human emotion. Wistful, yearning and wise." (Elizabeth Day)

"Faulks has returned to the terrain of Human Traces, geographically and thematically, with his new novel, Snow Country, the second in a planned Austrian trilogy that spans the first half of the 20th century and the reshaping of Europe through war.... The narrative moves between corresponding states of foreboding and reflection, rarely looking directly at the great war itself.... Through the gradual convergence of his characters' lives, Faulks powerfully evokes the mood of a continent that still has not processed its collective trauma, even as the threat of another looms.... In Snow Country, Faulks has created a richly melancholic novel of ideas that celebrates the pity, the comedy and the beauty of our brief lives." (The Guardian)

"Snow Country is a sprawling novel that ebbs and flows through decades as two deeply sensitive people find each other, lose each other, find others and lose others.... Among the tangled minutiae of human connection, Faulks laces the political and social upheaval of Europe in the first 30 years of the last century. The scope of this is remarkable; characters' lives play out in immense detail while retaining the observational quality Faulks has perfected rather than crossing over into mundane exposition.... Faulks has the rare ability to hold the human experience taut on the line, ready for inspection, examining each gleaming scale until veering towards the hypnotic.... Its own unique and expansive love story, ambling through decades." (The Irish Times)