Snow Country Sebastian Faulks

SNOW COUNTRY BY SEBASTIAN FAULKS

Hardback published by Hutchinson 2nd September 2021

1914

Aspiring journalist Anton arrives in Vienna, where he meets Delphine, a woman of experience and deep secrets. Entranced by the light of first love, Anton comes to life. Until his country declares war on hers.

1927

For Lena, life with her mother in a small town has been cosseted and cold. After a few years of schooling, she encounters a young lawyer who spirits her away to Vienna. However, what she imagines to be love soon crumbles, and she leaves the city behind to take a post at the snow-capped sanatorium, the Schloss Seebkick.

1933

Having loss of so many friends on the Eastern Front, Anton, is sent to write about the mysterious Schloss Seeblick. In this place on the banks of a silvery lake, where the roots of human suffering are laid bare, two people will see each other as if for the first time. Sweeping across the Europe as it recovers from one war and awaits the coming of another, Snow Country is a landmark novel of exquisite yearnings, dream of youth and sanctity of hope. In elegant, shimmering prose, Sebastian Faulks has produced an epic love story of timeless resonance.

MY REVIEW

Sebastian Faulks writes excellent exciting literature fiction and nonfiction. Snow country is the second book in a planned trilogy the first being Human Traces 2005. Each novel can e read as a stand-alone, however without reference to the others, Lena is pronounced as Layna, rather than Leena.

Extract from Snow Country chapter 2 page 20

Anton Heideck had arrived in Vienna at the age of nineteen in the wet autumn of 1906. The fallen leaves stuck to the pavements of the narrow street in Spittelberg in which, after a demoralising search, he’d found a room to rent. He was one of the few students not to press into the cafes after lectures in the hope of catching a glimpse of some literary hero; what he admired were the newspaper dispatches from Viennese correspondents in Paris and Moscow. This could be a life, he dared to think one day, when he was buying a late edition of Die Presse. Writing reports from a foreign country might be a way of engaging with the world not as the protagonist, but as the recorder of the other men’s actions.

The Styrian town in which he had been brought up was known as a centre of Catholicism and the old ways; to Anton as a boy it had seemed simply disconnected from anything that was urgent, or desirable, or worth striving for. His brother Gerhard was seven years older and did everything that was asked of him by their father: he was the victor ludorum at the school athletics and took his first Communion with shining hair and a pious look; he was the subject of admiring reports from his teachers at the end of the year. His parents hardly seemed to notice Anton, who sometimes wondered if his arrival in the world had come as a surprise to them. Gerhard meanwhile treated him with maddening tolerance, even when Anton brought his best friend Friedrich home from school and used his elder brother’s bedroom for a wrestling match.

ABOUT AUTHOR SEBASTIAN FAULKS