First edition, trade issue, signed by the author ‘Sebastian Faulks’ on the title-page. Researched and written over a period of five years, Human Traces was Faulks’s seventh novel and, according to the author’s website, it ‘was, and remains, his most ambitious yet. Its theme is the nature of humanity: the make-up of our conscious minds and what it is that makes humans so perplexingly different from other creatures’. ¶¶

In the opinion of the psychiatrist Stephen McWilliams, ‘[i]t is with exceptional clarity that Faulks describes schizophrenia, not simply its signs and symptoms, but the reactions of relatives and friends to an illness that will not be named until some thirty-five years later when Swiss psychiatrist Eugen Bleuler finally coins the term’ (Fiction & Physicians: Medicine through the Eyes of Writers (Dublin, 2012), p. 199), and he concludes that ‘Human Traces is a gripping story of two doctors whose fiery paths cross during the birth of an entire profession. From an academic perspective, it pits psychoanalysis against biological psychiatry (a battle that still endures to this day); from a literary perspective, it is an epic journey filled with passion, friendship, loyalty and conflict, and a moving exploration of the inexorable passage of time’ (op. cit., p. 202). ¶¶¶

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