Human Traces by Sebastian Faulks

I was tentative beginning this book because I so loved Engleby, the first book by Faulks I read, and was afraid I would be disappointed.  I wasn't.  In Human Traces Faulks traces the early history of psychiatry from the alienists of the late 1900s through to the end of the first world war, but does so through the lives of two extraordinary men, Englishman Thomas and Breton Jacques driven by personal history and their own youthful intelligence and fire to understand how the mind works and to solve and cure mental illness.  Towards the end I got a little confused with characters but this was more than made up for by Faulks bringing to life a time in history when the fields of psychology, psychiatry and neurology were in their infancy.  His research into different areas of study must have been intense: the sanotoriums in the Alps, fossilised human footprints in the Great Rift in Africa, fin de siecle Paris and London, fighting in the Italian Alps in World War One, Faulks brought all of these alive for me with heartbreaking force.