Human Traces
2005 novel by Sebastian Faulks
Human Traces is a 2005 novel by British writer Sebastian Faulks, best known for his novels Birdsong and Charlotte Gray. Human Traces took Faulks five years to write. It tells of two friends who set up a pioneering asylum in 19th-century Austria, in tandem with the evolution of psychiatry and the start of the First World War.
Plot overview
Tracing the intertwined lives of Doctors Thomas Midwinter, who is English, and Jacques Rebière, from Brittany, France, Human Traces explores the development of psychiatry and psychoanalysis in the late 19th century, by way of excursions into first alienism then metaphysics, human evolution and neuroscience, before the search for what it means to be human takes us into a brief foray into the First World War. Central to the plot is the theory of bicameral mentality.
Background
Faulks called the novel "a Sisyphean task", writing, "After spending five years in libraries reading up on madness, psychiatry and psychoanalysis (my office had charts and timelines and things plastered all over the walls), the act of finishing it felt like a bereavement.
Reception
Whilst some have criticised Human Traces as excessively expository, detailed and didactic, it has also been considered wide-ranging, ambitious and well written. It has enjoyed commercial success, having been a bestseller in the United Kingdom.
References
External links
Faulks, Sebastian (2006). Human Traces.
This brief starts where responsible research should: with the source description of “Human Traces” as 2005 novel by Sebastian Faulks. Everything that follows is an evidence route, not borrowed authority.
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The subject matters to the arts & letters register because the source frames it as 2005 novel by Sebastian Faulks. Its deeper value depends on whether names, dates, institutions and citations support that framing.
Reception evidence should be dated and situated: later canonical status may differ sharply from the work’s initial circulation. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jun 11, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q5937647. 1 of 1 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 2005 and 2006.
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This entry incorporates text from “Human Traces” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.