Editions

A Possible Life

  • Imprint: Vintage

  • ISBN: 9780099549222

  • Length: 304  Pages

  • Dimensions: 198mm x 19mm x 129mm

  • Weight: 244g

  • RRP: £9.99

A Possible Life

Terrified, a young prisoner in the Second World War closes his eyes and pictures himself going out to bat on a sunlit cricket ground in Hampshire.

Across the courtyard in a Victorian workhouse, a father too ashamed to acknowledge his son.

A skinny girl steps out of a Chevy with a guitar; her voice sends shivers through the skull.

Soldiers and lovers, parents and children, scientists and musicians risk their bodies and hearts in search of connection – some key to understanding what makes us the people we become.

Provocative and profound, Sebastian Faulks’s dazzling novel journeys across continents and time to explore the chaos created by love, separation and missed opportunities. From the pain and drama of these highly particular lives emerges a mysterious consolation: the chance to feel your heart beat in someone else’s life.

  • Imprint: Vintage

  • ISBN: 9780099549222

  • Length: 304  Pages

  • Dimensions: 198mm x 19mm x 129mm

  • Weight: 244g

  • RRP: £9.99

Reviews

  • Both intriguing and unsettling… [Faulks’s] versatility as a writer is showcased in A Possible Life

    Discover Your History

  • Most easily appreciated as a series of compelling short stories. Poignant, powerful and tender, they are lined by the pain and passion, hope and hardship, accident and design which make up the drama of an individual life

    John Koski, Mail on Sunday

  • It does what any good novel should – it unsettles, it moves, and it forces us to question who we are

    Sunday Times

  • A delight… A tightly written, moving and exciting

    Daily Telegraph

  • Faulks is a writer who gets better and better; he understands how to draw a reader in.

    Daily Mail

  • A Possible Life is more than the sum of its parts . . . the stories acquire power as resonances between them accrete. Only at the end do you realise you’ve been won over by their quiet, glinting virtuosity

    The Times

  • Profound… Faulks evokes a deep compassion for all his troubled characters…exploring big ideas without compromising the human drama

    Observer

  • Faulk’s most intriguing fictional offering... Moving...engaging...poignant

    Independent on Sunday

More from this Author

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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.

Sebastian Faulks

Read more

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Recommendations

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Extracts

Where My Heart Used to Beat

Disappear to a secluded island with this novel about war, love and loss
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Features

An interview with Sebastian Faulks

Sebastian Faulks talks about his writing, research for his novels and his inspirations.

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