These are Sebastian Faulks' responses to your questions:
 
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1. The trench battles in Birdsong are possibly the most heartbreakingly terrifying I have read in any novel. How did you feel writing it and how did you feel reading the research material that inspired you to write the book?

I frequently felt overcome by emotion. At such times I would stop writing. I felt the pity, the rage, the horror, very deeply and often, but it is no good being in a state when you write. The more profound the emotion you are hoping to evoke the more icily you have to concentrate on finding the exact detail that will chill or horrify. You cannot say, 'it was appalling' etc; you have to offer details that allow the reader to infer how appalling it was, and choosing those details is a very cold-blooded, intellectual thing to do. Tears get in the way, and they make your glasses foggy so you can't see the paper.

Before you start, though, and later, when you are no longer in the scene, you have to have sobbed and shaken.

Kelly Shepherd, Derbyshire

I wondered why they didn't like the others! No, no, I mean you can't take these lists seriously. What kind of list is it that prefers Jacqueline Wilson to Flaubert or Harry Potter to Tolstoy?

Carol Phillips, Beds

3. I'm surprised Birdsong has not been made into a film, will it be coming to our screens in the future? How would you feel about a cinematic adaptation of the book and how much input would you expect to have?

It has been under option for ten years. It is currently with Working Title, who made Captain Corelli and all the Richard Curtis comedies. They have bought the rights and don't consult with me. I only hear at fifth hand what is going on. I think they do intend to make it, but I don't know when or who will direct it. It is such a long saga. They have offered the main part to Jake Gylenhaal, who begged for it then declined it, and to Jude Law who declined it. Peter Weir and Michael Mann both declined to direct it. Iain Softley has been hired and fired. I have twice been hired and twice fired from the script. Harold Pinter accepted to do it but they couldn't afford him. I could go on! All film people are bonkers or dim, or both.

A long novel set between 1876 and 1925 about the nature of being human, with special ref to psychiatry, evolution, consciousness, psycho-analysis, set in Lincolnshire, Brittany, Paris, Vienna, Klagenfurt, Pasadena and German East Africa. A few laughs too.

I think it is in some ways quite traditionally structured and that therefore if a child could be taught how to appreciate its workings he/she might be able to apply that understanding to other novels. Most children seem to like it, though I am amazed at how young it is given to them to read. I wouldn't have thought someone under the age of 18 could really manage it.

6. What have you enjoyed reading recently?

The American writers Richard Yates and Lorrie Moore. But alas most of what I have been reading is background for the book and of limited interest to a general reader, though I do recommend The Madness of Adam and Eve by David Horrobin.

7. There have been many fictional accounts of the First World War; did you feel under pressure to make your novel stand out? What do you think it is that sets Birdsong apart from the others?

I think that many novels were written by officers about ten years later and are really memoirs offered with a degree of self-protective irony. Birdsong is a very head-on, unironic book. It holds nothing back. Also it tells it from the ordinary man's point of view. It is more of a novel, with the full novelistic palette, than those elegant, restrained memoirs. It has women and children and families, themes, sub-plots etc. Most first war novels are not really novels at all but memoirs and I think that is perhaps where Birdsong fits in. But I really don't know the answer to this question.

8. The research you did for Birdsong was clearly very detailed and thorough; did you have any personal sources of information such as friends or relatives who were able to share their first-hand experiences of war with you?

No, no first hand experiences. My paternal grandfather was too old (!) to fight, my maternal grandfather did fight but was killed in WWII so I never met him. I did talk to various veterans and got some feeling from them. It was good to stand in the mud with men who had been there. One of them held my hand as he described what had happened and through him I felt connected, physically, to the experience, But most of my research was from contemporary documents in the Imperial War Museum. I prefer to work from documents. Documents don't lie. They always remember. They don't get drunk at lunch time and fall asleep.
Mostly, however -- and I cannot over-emphasise the importance of this function to the novelist -- I made it up.

Stephen is ambivalent, yes. Jack begins as a faithful man, but what he sees makes him slowly lose his faith. He sees the padre at the Somme wrench off his collar/cross and God dies in him. This is the natural route.
Stephen, being a perverse man, goes the other way. The more the evidence against God mounts up, the more he comes to believe that there must be some explanation of all this. It is this curiosity -- part human, part spiritual -- that enables him to survive.

Very much so. I have always been struck by the thought that Hiroshima was once just a town with a bank and a park and a few shops and factories, that Auschwitz used to be a an unknown village in the Polish woods. Likewise, the Somme was just a river where people went fishing.
Thinking about these facts underlines the strangeness of human life, how even the cornerstones and foundations are utterly random.

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Mary Lawson for Crow Lake

Mark Haddon for The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time

Karin Slaughter for Kisscut and Blindsighted

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