Fires Which Burned Brightly
  • Published: 4 September 2025
  • ISBN: 9781804955031
  • Imprint: Penguin
  • Format: Audio Download
  • RRP: $45.00
Categories:

Fires Which Burned Brightly

A Life in Progress

  • Sebastian Faulks
Formats & editions
Hardback
2 Sep 2025
EBook
4 Sep 2025
Audiobook
4 Sep 2025
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Ten wise and wryly funny essays in place of a memoir from bestselling novelist Sebastian Faulks

‘The only dividend of the years’ vanishing, as far as I can see, is that it makes aspects of the past appear more interesting or humorous than they felt at the time.’

In Fires Which Burned Brightly, Faulks, a reluctant memoirist, offers readers a series of detailed snapshots from a life in progress. They include a post-war rural childhood – ‘cold mutton and wet washing on a rack over the range’ – the booze-sodden heyday of Fleet Street and a career as one of the country’s most acclaimed novelists.

There are not one, but two daring escapes from boarding school; the delirium of a jetlagged American book tour; the writing of Birdsong in his brother’s house in 1992; and memorable trips across the channel to France. Politics, psychiatry and frustrated ventures into the world of entertainment are analysed with patience and rueful humour.

The book is driven by a desire ‘to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time.’ It ends with a tribute to Faulks’s parents and a sense of how his own generation was shaped by the disruptive power of war and its aftermath.

Sharply perceptive and alive with a generous wit, Fires Which Burned Brightly is a work of subtle yet profound intelligence and warmth.
  • Published: 4 September 2025
  • ISBN: 9781804955031
  • Imprint: Penguin
  • Format: Audio Download
  • RRP: $45.00
Categories:

Praise for Fires Which Burned Brightly

A wonderful portrait of an age, and of a writer

RORY STEWART, author of Politics on the Edge

Utterly fascinating

DAVID KYNASTON, author of A Northern Wind

Shot through with the kind of depth and detail that can only come from a masterful writer finally turning his pen to his own life. Fresh, wise and finely-wrought

ALICE WINN, author of In Memoriam

As charming and funny in schoolboy episodes as he is thought-provoking in the darker environs of mental health, Sebastian Faulks is always resonant, civilised and sane

MARK KNOPFLER

Sebastian Faulks is one of our finest living authors, a writer whose work has often explored the fragility of human sanity and how easily it can unravel . . . A wise and heartfelt piece of writing

The Times

Intriguing, fascinating and enlightening . . . filled with gratitude and charm, but also full of evidence of the endless curiosity that is every great novelist’s weapon of choice

Nick Duerden, i Paper