Human Traces
by Sebastian Faulks
Buy on AmazonSixteen-year-old Jacques Rebière is living a humble life in rural France, studying butterflies and frogs by candlelight in his bedroom. Across the Channel, in England, the playful Thomas Midwinter, also sixteen, is enjoying a life of ease-and is resigned to follow his father's wishes and pursue a career in medicine. A fateful seaside meeting four years later sets the two young men on a profound course of friendship and discovery; they will become pioneers in the burgeoning field of psychiatry. But when a female patient at the doctors' Austrian sanatorium becomes dangerously ill, the two men's conflicting diagnosis threatens to divide them--and to undermine all their professional achievements.…
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"“Human Traces” is the one I would want to be buried with. It’s long and it has some sticky parts, including a couple of lectures. But I like it because it deals with what to me is the great theme: Why are human beings so odd."
By the Book: Sebastian Faulks · nytimes.com