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How much do you know about World War I? If you're like me, very little. In his introduction to Birdsong, Sebastian Faulks explains that World War II came along so quickly, that the preceding conflict was kind of overlooked in literature, and not as much was written about it. Well he certainly did his best to address that gap with the masterful Birdsong.

We begin in 1910. Stephen Wraysford, a 20-year-old Englishman, travels to Amiens on business. He falls head over heels for Isabelle, an older woman, who leaves her husband and stepchildren to begin a new life with her lover. Eventually, she becomes overwhelmed with guilt and returns to her family, leaving Stephen crushed. Six years later, he is back in the same region, now a Lieutenant in the British forces preparing for the Battle of the Somme. In the face of absolute horror and probable death, he does not allow himself to think about love, or what life after this conflict could even look like. But he just might end up seeing Isabelle again, and perhaps there is more to their story than he knows.

The romance is one of the reasons Birdsong works so well. The passion in Stephen and Isabelle's relationship is so electric - the snatched, illicit moments of their affair, the excitement of their elopement, the possibilities that lay ahead. And of course, its demise is devastating. All of Stephen's army colleagues have somebody they want to return home to, a face they desperately want to see again that gives them a reason to survive. He tells himself that he doesn't have anyone like this, that he never did. But deep down, he knows that's not true.

However, the crowning achievement of Birdsong is its unflinching depiction of war. The earsplitting cacophony of the artillery, the claustrophobia of the tunnels, the never-ending mud, the smell of sweat and shit, the horror of seeing a head explode in front of your eyes. The heartbreaking letters sent home from the Somme, its writers knowing that they were almost certainly going to die in the coming hours. The bodies in pieces, pale and rotting in no man's land. The senseless brutality of it all, summed up by a roll call after the battle, ringing with unanswered names:

"Names came pattering into the dusk, bodying out the places of their forebears, the villages and towns where the telegrams would be delivered, the houses where the blinds would be drawn, where low moans would come in the afternoon behind closed doors; and the places that had borne them, which would be like nunneries, like dead towns without their life or purpose, without young men at the factories or in the fields, with no husbands for the women, no deep sound of voices in the inns, with the children who would have been born, who would have grown and worked or painted, even governed, left ungenerated in their fathers' shattered flesh that lay in stinking shellholes in the beet crop soil, leaving their homes to put up only granite slabs in place of living flesh, on whose inhuman surface the moss and lichen would cast their crawling green indifference."

I came very close to awarding this novel the full five stars, but I did find it a little bit drawn-out at times, especially in the final chapters. This is a small complaint (and maybe I am too hard to please!). For at its best, Birdsong is a stunning feat - tense, powerful and unbearably moving. It's the kind of book you want to press into the hands of world leaders before they embark on some unnecessary, avoidable war. An unforgettable read.