Sebastian Faulks, the celebrated author of Birdsong and Charlotte Gray, talked about his new memoir, Fires Which Burned Brightly: A Life in Progress.
He discussed his research into Charlotte Gray and the joy of discovering that the French Resistance’s code word for the moon was Charlotte. His thrills mounted when staying in France and his wife discovered a coin from 1941 Vichy France which he glued to the side of his typewriter as a talisman.
But, he said, novelists shouldn’t get too hung up on research: ‘Fiction,’ he said, ‘doesn’t have to be accurate. It has to be convincing.’
