In early February I settled into reading the latest novel from one of my favourite authors Sebastian Faulks (see my blogs on Paris Echo, Where My Heart Used to Beat and A Possible Life). This one is Snow Country and it is a follow-up to Human Traces, which I read when it came out in 2005.

It is set in 1914, 1927 and 1933 and follows the story of Anton and the much younger Lena. Anton’s adult life is just beginning in 1914, before the outbreak of the First World War. He has an exciting career as a journalist, which takes him to the building of the Panama Canal and to the Caillaux adultery trial in Paris, and he is newly and deeply in love. His path then crosses with Lena’s in Vienna in 1927, when Anton is trying to cope with the fallout of the war and Lena is making a way for herself in the city after the death of her mother. They then come together again in 1933 at the Schloss Seeblick, the place that ties this new trilogy together. The Schloss is at the cutting edge of supporting people with mental health problems and using psychoanalysis, but is a place with its own difficult past.

I very much enjoyed escaping into mid-twentieth century Austria and am looking forward to the final instalment in Faulks’ planned Austrian trilogy.