The clinic, now run by Midwinter’s daughter Martha, has been forced to sell its mountain-top premises and is once again housed in the old sanatorium by the lake. In the years leading up to the war, Anton Heideck arrives in Vienna to study and later to pursue a career in journalism, though he drifts through his days without much sense of purpose until he falls in love with Delphine Fourmentier, an older French woman who “made him feel interesting, even to himself”.

Snow Country by Sebastian Faulks review — a blizzard of big ideas Snow Country by Sebastian Faulks review — a blizzard of big ideas

This may seem like petty historical quibbling, but Anton's strange geopolitical naivety on the eve of war is symptomatic of a larger problem with Snow Country. He continued to work as a journalist, becoming the first literary editor of The Independent in 1986. Snow Country’s infantilisation of its female characters is so blatant that it sometimes feels like a clever pastiche of patriarchal narrative conventions. It was an interesting journey through a desperate and depressing time in Austria and the other close countries involved in the Great War.A particularly strong element of the writing are the beautifully written descriptions of the area in and around the Schloss and these are so easy to visualise. I chose that time because then the writing's on the wall, and it should be clear to anyone half-sensible that the game is up, but they're still going on.

Snow Country by Sebastian Faulks | Waterstones Snow Country by Sebastian Faulks | Waterstones

I normally know how I feel about a novel quite early on and that view seldom changes as I progress through the story – but this one was different. Antony’s journalistic career is interesting as we follow him from Vienna to Paris where he reports on the trial of Henriette Caillaux as war looms in the background.

Of course, Faulks is perfectly entitled to this stance, but it is a strange one to take in a novel so explicitly concerned with loss, memory and the lasting effects of trauma.