Austrian Trilogy Books in Order

The Austrian Trilogy is a loose sequence of novels connected by place and theme rather than by a single protagonist. It begins with Human Traces and continues with Snow Country, each circling around Schloss Seeblick, a psychiatric clinic in the mountains of Carinthia, and around the question of what it means to be “sane” in a violently changing Europe.

In Human Traces we meet Jacques Rebière, from Brittany, and Thomas Midwinter, from England, who share a teenage conviction that madness should be understood, not feared. As they train in medicine and travel through the lecture halls of Paris, rural asylums, Californian frontiers and African plains, they collect theories and cases that might explain why some minds fracture. Eventually they create Schloss Seeblick, a lakeside sanatorium high in the Austrian countryside, intended as a modern refuge where patients are listened to rather than hidden away.

Faulks uses their friendship and their families to explore nineteenth‑century debates about evolution, neurology, religion and the soul. The novel moves gradually towards the First World War, suggesting that ideas about the mind cannot be separated from the political storms that engulf the continent. For many readers, Human Traces is his most ambitious “novel of ideas”, steeped in medical history but anchored by recognisable domestic lives.

Snow Country returns to Austria in the early twentieth century. Anton Heideck is a young journalist who comes to Vienna hungry for work and experience, falls intensely in love with a French woman, then loses her as war breaks across Europe. Lena, born poor in a small southern town to an alcoholic mother, believes her life will never amount to much until she is drawn first to Vienna and then to the mysterious sanatorium on the lake.

By the 1930s Schloss Seeblick is run by Martha Midwinter, Thomas’s daughter, and its grand ambitions have been scaled back by war, economic crisis and doubt about what psychiatry can really offer. When Anton arrives to write a magazine piece on the clinic, his assignment brings him face to face with his own trauma and with Lena, whose stubborn resilience has carried her from domestic drudgery to work among the patients. Their intertwined stories explore guilt, desire and the possibility of healing in a Europe sliding towards another catastrophe.

Together, the books treat the mind itself as a contested landscape, as dramatic in its way as any battlefield.

Although the Austrian Trilogy is structured chronologically, the novels can be read independently. Starting with Human Traces gives the fullest sense of the clinic’s origins and the optimism of early psychiatry; starting with Snow Country offers a more compact, intimate entry point set between the wars. Read in sequence, they show how beliefs about consciousness, illness and responsibility evolve across generations, and how a single building in the mountains can absorb, reflect and sometimes ease the damage done by a turbulent century.