When Gregory goes missing over France, Charlotte persuades herself that she can combine her proposed work for G Section with an unofficial search for her lover, and she is dropped by parachute over central western France, ending up in a village called Lavaurette. Her command of French and her apparent self-discipline lead her to be recruited by ‘G’ Section, an undercover organisation that is clearly based on the real-life Special Operations Executive (SOE). While working as a doctor’s assistant, Charlotte meets and falls in love with an English RAF pilot, Peter Gregory, whose carefree approach to life and death contrasts with her own deeply considered attitudes.

She is a highly principled, somewhat reserved character and is not immediately at home in the rackety life of the war-time capital. In her early twenties, she leaves Scotland to come to London, where she wants to help the Allied war effort. Despite its harrowing subject matter, it has proved one of Faulks’s most popular novels, remains his best seller in hardback and has sold more than a million copies overall in the United Kingdom.Ĭharlotte Gray is the daughter of Captain Gray, Stephen Wraysford’s commanding officer in Birdsong. The main character’s search for her missing lover in occupied France is set against an uncompromising portrayal of French political life under the German occupation, including French co-operation in the deportation of Jews to Auschwitz. It is the most inward-looking of the three books, dealing with themes of memory and loss. Set during the Second World War, this was the last of Faulks’s French trilogy, following The Girl at the Lion d’Or and Birdsong.

Charlotte Gray by Sebastian Faulks