Why should my life be different or special? None of us is spared by history. That’s what history is. A leveller. A universal joke whose shape is visible only in retrospect. God laughs when he hears our plans, but history laughs louder”

Snow Country - Sebastian Faulks

I have always wanted to return to this territory, and Snow Country, my new novel, revisits the sanatorium that Thomas and Jacques set up in the high days of hope. The big question remains unanswered; but now it is 1934 and the world faces fresh challenges. There are new characters and different stories to tell. EXCERPT: When Anton arrived the following day, he found that Delphine had set up a work table for him at the window overlooking the park.Sebastian Faulks’ latest novel is beautifully written, shot through with a sense of the frailty of love that is at times reminiscent of William Faulkner’s The Wild Palms… This is a superb novel, a love story of enormous emotional weight and a portrait of Europe torn apart, and preparing to rend itself once again. a b c Bedell, Geraldine (16 March 2008). "The many selves of Sebastian". The Observer . Retrieved 20 March 2012. Snow country manages to powerfully combine a detailed and intimate focus on the lives and minds of its main characters, with a grand overview of a tumultuous and rapidly changing world across three decades. Sebastian answered, ‘Well, partly, it's because Snow Country is revisiting the territory of an earlier book I wrote called Human Traces, which came out in 2005. I wanted some of the characters in that who were children to reappear as grownups. But it's not a sequel, it has a sort of cousin relationship, you might say. It is a very interesting period. Austria in 1910, is the last gasp of the old Empire. In 1934, Austria, when the book ends, it is undergoing a kind of civil war between the left and the right.’

Snow Country by Sebastian Faulks | Goodreads

Sebastian Faulks’s 2005 novel, Human Traces, made explicit his ongoing fascination with the mystery of human consciousness and the forces – historical, political and biological – that converge to shape an individual life. Its two central characters, Thomas Midwinter and Jacques Rebière, are psychiatrists with opposing views on maladies of the mind who pool their expertise to found a state-of-the-art sanatorium in the Austrian mountains at the end of the 19th century. The novel focuses on the effects of war, the political tensions in Austria and the rise of facism as well as the growth of psychoanalysis away from Freud’s theories to more compassionate and gentle treatments. Lena and Anton are both recipients of Martha’s wise counselling, freeing them to move on with their lives. It’s a literary novel with beautiful prose, particularly the description of the Schloss and it’s lake. I found the sections in the Schloss and the discussion of current psychotherapy interesting and very much liked Martha and her ideas. Overall, the novel is fairly slow moving, being mostly driven by the three main characters and their personal insecurities, loves and losses. While I enjoyed reading it, it didn’t affect me in the same way that Birdsong did, but maybe that’s too much to ask for. If you do nothing, you will be auto-enrolled in our premium digital monthly subscription plan and retain complete access for 65 € per month.

I had the chance to hear Faulks’s Interview with Clare Armistead at Charleston, Sussex on 3 Sept 2021, the day of the book’s launch. Some interesting reflections on Snow Country and wider matters were aired: The times in which Snow Country is set were cataclysmic, though people didn’t know it. The end point , 1934 was the time of the Austrian Civil War. Lena – born to an alcoholic mother who enjoys the experience of pregnancy but rather avoids what comes after. A fine and profoundly intelligent novel, written by an author who balances big ideas with human emotion. Wistful, yearning and wise. Elizabeth Day

Snow Country by Sebastian Faulks review – the collective

The more scattered historical details Faulks includes, the more Snow Country begins to feel like an I-Spy of early twentieth-century history. In the wake of the 1934 February Uprising, the novel’s final chapter opens with a phone call from an editor asking Anton to go to Germany to cover “a political rally due to take place in a medieval town called Nuremberg”. This raises several questions. Does neither of these men know the name of the German chancellor? Have they not taken any prior notice of the Nazi rallies that have been held annually since 1923? Have they never heard of Nuremberg before? It is rare and fascinating for a novelist to nurse an idea for so many years while writing other generally admirable but very different novels in the interval…. [Snow Country] is a novel of ideas, an exploration of the question of human consciousness…. Lena ends this one by asking “what if it turns out it was all a joke… The whole thing of being alive at all…” One waits to find out if there is an answer to that. I trust that the wait will not be near as long as the interval between the first and second books of the trilogy. Meanwhile, cherish the intelligence and humanity of Snow Country. Anton, asked if his book has sold well, admits it didn’t, but nevertheless sold much better than Dr Freud’s. There’s humour here as well, as in almost all good novels; and this is a very good one. Anton – a roaming journalist who witnesses the building of the Suez Canal before experiencing the horror of war.And of course, it also did not help that the story just felt like a badly done regurgitation of Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain. I hated reading The Magic Mountain, but even I have to concede that it was written well. I would never discourage anyone from reading it for themselves. I’m not sure I can do the same with Snow Country. Broadmoor hospital in Berkshire where Sebastian Faulks conducted some of his research into the human mind Photograph: Paul Doyle/Alamy