Sebastian Faulks is a highly accomplished writer and I very much enjoy his writing.
So when I started this memoir, I was very much looking forward to it. But even I couldn’t anticipate how good it would be.
It’s sincere, emotional, funny and incredibly honest, with tales of book tours and escapes from boarding school, and homage to his parents. This truly is a remarkable book and I loved every moment of it.

A thought provoking set of essays. Once you get started you just want to read the next one. Parts made me smile as I thought of my own childhood. An interesting read.

This is a memoir and essay book written very poetically and has excellent literary value thanks to Faulks’ amazing writing, insights and narrative.
It is a warm and nostalgic book about some crucial moments, topics, relationships in the author’s life - mostly relatable, and when not, curious to know.

Fires Which Burned Brightly by Sebastian Faulks
Will be Published on 2 Sep 2025.
Thank you for providing me the digital ARC copy @netgalley @penguinrandomhouse @hutchheinemann

Blurb-

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.

📖
It's nostalgic, warm, vividly portrayed exploring life and the world around us. Reminiscing adolescence and coming of age like an opportunity to stroll down memory lane.
I liked the crispy humourous tone which was different than his novel yet so firm, a delight to read.
A great emotional terrain makes readers intrigued to the book.

Having read many of Sebastian Faulks’ novels I was expecting ‘Fires Which Burned Brightly - A Life In Progress’, to contain the same attention to detail and depth of analysis; I was not disappointed. The story of his childhood in the 1950’s and 60’s brings the period vividly to life in the recall of fine detail and humorous anecdotes. The account of his time as a newspaper journalist is both informative and entertaining, and insight into his subsequent career as a writer fascinating. The hybrid format, described in the forward as a series of essays, allows for inclusion of his thoughts on psychiatry, the progression of post war Western capitalist society and the development of our current politics. These are well argued and informative. Thanks to the author and NetGalley for an advanced reading copy in return for an honest review.

Much as he looks back to childhood and writes about key moments in his life, Sebastian Faulks’ ‘Fires Which Burned Brightly’ proclaims on its cover that it is not a memoir, and that’s fine by me. Frankly, I’ll take any of his ten essays, in any order, given that they are so well written, so thoughtful, wonderfully self-deprecating, and full of signs of the times on which he’s dwelling.

His chapters on childhood opened up rarely regarded memory banks of my own childhood. Just a few years younger than the writer, I remember the mutton gristle, the reliance on the imagination for entertainment, the peculiarities of village school life and the horror of boarding school misery at the age of eight. Do you have to have had a similar childhood to become fully immersed in the constraints and freedoms of post WW2 life? Not at all. The delights and fears of childhood explored here prompt us all to think about where we’ve come from.

I particularly enjoyed the chapters which focus on the birth of specific novels, the research undertaken, the self-discipline required to release the narrative and, finally, the more tedious aspects of the publicity circus. As a result, I shall certainly re-read his earliest novels, reminded of the immediacy he creates and the intelligence of his story telling.

Whilst some may be disappointed that very little emphasis is given to his current domestic set-up, clearly a very happy one, I applaud this. It could feel rather contrary not to focus on friends and family but the focus in this collection of essays is, Faulks explains, “…not the story of a life, and maybe that’s just as well because I’m not sure there’s a documentary way of writing about such things. A novel’s the best place for emotional truths: it’s made for them.”

An excellent, fascinating, thought-provoking set of essays. If you think you might dip into them from time to time, be warned. Once immersed, it’s hard to put this book down.

My thanks to NetGalley and Random House UK, Cornerstone for a copy of this book in exchange for a fair review.

Moving away from strict autobiographical tradition, this is a collection of carefully balanced essays which the author has used to reflect certain aspects of his life, in rough chronological order, which he considers useful or indicative of the essential self he wishes to show the reader. There is, for example, very little mention of his wife and children but a great deal of reflection and focus on his relationship with his parents and brother. I enjoyed the book because it was slightly unconventional in its organisation and execution. Thoughtful, at times funny and at other times touching.