Faulks developed the novel to bring more public awareness to the experience of war remembered by WWI veterans.

Birdsong is part of a loose trilogy of novels by Sebastian Faulks, alongside The Girl at the Lion d'Or and Charlotte Gray; the three are linked through location, history and several minor characters.

[3] Birdsong is one of Faulks's best-received works, earning both critical and popular praise, including being listed as the 13th favourite book in Britain in a 2003 BBC survey called the Big Read.

Faulks wrote the novel partly because he felt that the First World War had not been discussed enough in both literary and historical contexts.

[citation needed] Reflecting on the novel twenty years later, Faulks felt that the published version did not fully do justice to the experience of war: it did not provide readers with "a full appreciation of the soldiers' physical experience; and, perhaps more importantly, a philosophical understanding of what it meant to be part of the first genocidal event of the century – the one that made the others imaginable".

[citation needed] Because Faulks felt that much of the extant World War I literature was deeply influenced by World War II literature, he deliberately avoided research with secondary documents, such as historical monographs, instead focusing on veteran interviews and period primary sources.

[5] The novel was also sold in translation in Italy, France, Spain, Latin America, Germany, Portugal, Brazil, Denmark, Poland, Israel, Sweden, Estonia, Japan, Turkey, Bulgaria, Serbia, Finland and the Netherlands.

Through his eyes, Faulks tells the reader about the first day on the Somme in July 1916 and the Battle of Messines near Ypres in the following year.

Stephen finds some explosives and Firebrace, himself close to death, tells him how to lay them in order to blast their way out of the tunnel.

The explosion successfully clears a way out for Stephen, and he is rescued by Levi, a Jewish German soldier, as the war ends.

Over dinner, she learns her mother was raised by Stephen and Jeanne, who married and settled in Norfolk after Elizabeth's grandmother Isabelle's premature death due to the postwar influenza epidemic.

[8] Michael Gorra, a professor of English literature, argues that Faulks seeks to demonstrate that "the past can be recovered, its code can be broken; it can be used to add meaning to contemporary life.

[10] Elizabeth's search for that history is a process of recovering that memory in order to gain a greater emotional relationships with her grandfather, to whom she had never felt connected.

[13] According to scholar Marzena Sokołowska-Paryż, Faulks treats the war as a way to "test human endurance" and explore the effect of carnage on the psyche.

[14] De Groot argues that this reinvestigation of a traumatic history mirrors a growing interest among both literary authors and historians in trauma as a thematic subject.

"[13] The novel frequently changes narrative perspectives, using a significant amount of interior monologue, direct speech and dramatic irony.

[16] Though employing an omniscient narrator who occasionally describes the events from a broad perspective, the novel tends to shadow a handful of characters closely, principally Stephen Wraysford, Isabelle Azair, Michael Weir, Jack Firebrace and Elizabeth Benson.

[16] Pat Wheeler, a scholar of literature, describes the narrative style as "both naturalistic and realistic and very much in the manner of the nineteenth century writers [Faulks] cites as literary influences"—Wheeler notes Émile Zola, Charles Dickens and George Gissing among these.

Birdsong came 13th in a 2003 BBC survey called the Big Read, which aimed to find Britain's favourite book.

[17] For example, Gorra found that the addition of a parallel narrative "[ran] into problems"—especially concerning Elizabeth Benson, whom he "stopped believing in [as a] character".

[9] Unlike other reviewers, the critic Sarah Belo did not question the historical investigation plot, but the depiction of Elizabeth's experience as a 1970s woman in England.

[9] Kate Saunders, reviewing Birdsong for The Sunday Times, praised the novel and described it as "without the political cynicism that colours more modern treatments of this catastrophe".

[20] The production starred Eddie Redmayne as Stephen Wraysford and Clémence Poésy as Isabelle Azaire, and was directed by Philip Martin, based on a screenplay by Abi Morgan.