Fires Which Burned Brightly - Sebastian Faulks

Fires Which Burned Brightly: a Life in Progress - Sebastian Faulks

A conversation with Sam Leith

Take a watchful lad (this memoir contains the most memorable description of prep school since Evelyn Waugh), add cricket, books and booze (‘I began to drink alcohol in earnest when I arrived at university’), and watch an artist take shape.

From sending edited copy whizzing down pipes to the print room in the Fleet Street of the 1980s, Sebastian Faulks became one of our most admired novelists, each best-seller - Human Traces, Birdsong, Charlotte Gray, and the list goes on - creating that ‘intimacy between strangers that draws tears out of the stone.’

Sam Leith, literary editor of The Spectator, holds Faulks to the light.