Human Traces

Human Traces is a 2005 novel by Sebastian Faulks, best known as the British author of Birdsong and Charlotte Gray. The novel took Faulks five years to write. It tells of two friends who set up a pioneering asylum in 19th-century Austria, in tandem with the evolution of psychiatry and the start of World War I. Human Traces presents a fictional attempt to discover the nature of mental illness in the late Victorian period through the intertwined liv... more

Human Traces is a 2005 novel by Sebastian Faulks, best known as the British author of Birdsong and Charlotte Gray. The novel took Faulks five years to write. It tells of two friends who set up a pioneering asylum in 19th-century Austria, in tandem with the evolution of psychiatry and the start of World War I. Human Traces presents a fictional attempt to discover the nature of mental illness in the late Victorian period through the intertwined lives of Doctors Thomas Midwinter, who is English, and Jacques Rebière, from Brittany, France. Jacques and Thomas meet as teenagers in 1880 when Thomas holidays in France with his sister Sonia and her husband. Jacques and Thomas come from very different backgrounds, but instantly become friends as both have burning ambitions to become doctors. In particular, they are fascinated by the way the mind works. Jacques has a particular interest in the subject because his older brother Olivier has a mental illness, the symptoms of which have... less