This was an outstanding book by Sebastian Faulks. It tells the story of a young Englishman who falls madly and passionately in love with a married woman. They leave together and life takes a different turn than he expects. She leaves him and he then joins the army to command a group of miners. Also woven into the narrative is the story of a future relative and her search to uncover her past.
The writing is amazing. He captures the lust and passion of the young lovers with intensity. The plotting advances the way life often does. Unexpected turns happen in their lives. Life does not follow the fairy tale plot and Birdsong emphasizes this. The sections pertaining to the war seem real. The reader is taken into the dangerous tunnels that extend under German lines and experience the violence and carnage alongside the soldiers.

Stephen folded his arms around her and squeezed her. He lay back on the bed with her head resting on his chest. He felt her body go limp as the muscles decontracted into sleep. there was the sound of doves in the garden. He felt his heart beat against her shoulder. The smell of roses came faintly from her scented neck. He settled his hand in the curve of her ribs. His nerves were stilled in the sensuous repletion of the moment that precluded thought. He closed his eyes. He slept, at peace.

They tracked out toward a shellhole, the sun bright, a lark above them. Blue sky, unseen by eyes trained on turned mud. They moved low toward a mine crater where bodies had lain for weeks uncollected. “Try to life him.” No sound of machine guns or snipers, though their ears were braced for noise. “Take his arms.” The incomprehensible order through the gas mouthpiece. The arms came away softly. “Not like that, not take his arms away.” On Weir’s collar a large rat, trailing something red down his back. A crow disturbed, lifting its black body up suddenly, battering the air with its big wings. Coker, Barlow shaking their heads under the assault of risen flies coming up, transforming black skin of corpses into green by their absence. The roaring of Goddard’s vomit made them laugh, snorting private mirth inside their masks. Goddard, releasing his mask, breathed in worse than he had expelled. Weir’s hands in double sandbags stretched out tentatively to a sapper’s uniform, undressing the chest in search of a disc which he removed, bringing skin with it into his tunic pocket. Jack’s recoil, even through course material, to the sponge of flesh. Bright and sleek on liver, a rat emerged from the abdomen; it levered and flopped flatly over the ribs, glutted with pleasure. Bit by bit on to stretchers, what flesh fell left in mud. Not men, but flies and flesh, thought Stephen. Brennan anxiously stripping a torso with no head. He clasped it with both hands, dragged legless up from the crater, his fingers vanishing into buttered green flesh. It was his brother.