Not shortlisted again? I can't complain, says Sebastian Faulks Broad-shouldered and bearded, in a crisp linen shirt, Faulks, 59, has a head of heroic leonine curls reminiscent of the bust of Emperor Commodus in the Capitoline Museums. He is also, by common consent, colossally talented. Yet his manner is - almost disappointingly - without imperiousness. Instead, he exudes the air of a man reluctantly dragged from his Herculean labours and hauled, blinking, into the sunlight. And now, having been chivvied away from his computer, where he dutifully sits all day without speaking to a soul - "I have done it for 20 years, I'm not sure I can do it for another 20 without going mad" - he is somehow the very embodiment of wry affability and lightly worn, yet deeply held, scholarship. So much so that I can't help thinking we really ought to see more of him. His is the gently authoritative foil to the hyperventilating John Walsh on The Write Stuff, the Radio 4 know-all quiz, and last year's immensely enjoyable BBC Two series, Faulks on Fiction. How does he feel, then, about being classed, along with his peers, as "c---"? "I missed that particular declaration by Howard," he smiles, when I mention it, signally failing to rise to the bait. Good on him. He's got a new book to publicise. He can't possibly believe what he says. Possibly not. But perhaps best not to count on it. Faulks, however - Wellington College; Emmanuel College, Cambridge; broadsheet literary editor - is the kind of straight-bat, patrician chap who tends to believe the best of people. On his last outing, to promote his excoriating and indeed corruscatingly funny dissection of modern Britain, A Week in December, he made some overheated remarks about the Koran to an interviewer. When they were printed, it caused a volley of criticism and he immediately apologised for anything that may have sounded "crude or intolerant." Yet, oddly, he harbours no ill-will towards the journalist, who might be construed as having stitched him up. "The fault was mine," he says, generously. In an effort to be fully understood, I overstated my thoughts in colourful language, I wasn't misquoted. The journalist was within her rights to reproduce what I said, but it was... unkind of her. His careful deployment of the word "unkind" - old-fashioned, yet peculiarly damning, in circles where kindness still has currency - might explain why his oeuvre was deemed required reading in a recent tongue-in-cheek Country Life profile of "A Modern Gentleman." That, and his memorably deft addition to the Bond series, Devil May Care, penned in just six weeks. It's actually jolly decent of Faulks, a purveyor of those rarities - copper-bottomed literary bestsellers that never repeat themselves - to have dutifully emerged from his west London home at all, given that yet again his name is missing from the newly announced Man Booker shortlist. For despite the Birdsong trilogy and his huge popularity (conspiracy theorists might suggest as punishment for it), his downright breathtaking range of narrative voices and plotlines, he has never received a major book award. "I feel so incredibly fortunate in the way that my life has worked out, that to ask for anything else would be preposterous, really," he says. And makes a fine fist of appearing to mean it. "To have been able to write the books I wanted to write, on demanding subjects like war and the history of psychiatry, and for them to have sold in the numbers they have - and then go around saying: 'Actually, I'd also like to have won the Costa Book of the Year"? That would be ridiculous. I'm not sure that it would, but given he has brought up the thorny issue of demanding subject matter, I gently take him to task for the cover of his new book. It is a lovely, compelling portrait of a woman seen from behind, artful tendrils of hair falling loose from their pins, alluring bare shoulders and back - a sweep of naked sensuousness. I was, not unreasonably, expecting if not Fifty Shades of Charlotte Gray, then something less harrowing than a gut-wrenching account of a Nazi death camp, which is the opener for the quintet of loosely linked stories. "I see your point, but if we'd put Auschwitz watchtowers that would have been misleading, too, because that's not what the book is about," he says. It's hard to pin down what this enigmatic work is about (especially if you've not had the crib notes from page 359 of Human Traces), but trapping the elusive essence of what makes us who we are is as good a glib précis as any. "What I'm trying to explain is philosophical and misty and nebulous," he says, which must have caused quiet consternation at his publishers. I don't think anyone will finish it and cry, 'Ah, I get it now!. It will be more, 'Oh, that's sent a shiver through me. It's brought a tear to my eye." " He draws parallels with the movements of a symphony; the changes of tone and instrumentation and pace that somehow hang together. These stories do make a whole. That's the challenge for me, and I would like readers to feel they are in safe hands. Faulks, married to Veronica, who works for a film production company, has three children. His eldest, William, is reading English at Leeds, daughter Holly is studying French and Italian in Bristol, and the youngest, Arthur, is at an independent day school. "I adore my children without reservation, but I find their sleeping habits irritating and their lack of energy and indolence incredibly worrying," he observes with a sigh. Faulks is not the indolent type. He plays tennis, a bit of cricket, walks his handsome whippet Hector, and likes to get stuck into his vegetable patch, where he grows "sensible" produce, such as potatoes and courgettes. When his tomatoes stayed stubbornly green in the dismal summer, he picked them, laid them on a tray and carried them about the garden from one sunny spot to another in the (over-) optimistic hope they would ripen. Whether it was for his benefit or the tomatoes" is a moot point. "I don't do interviews at home any more because my wife doesn't like having her taste in interiors put through the mill," he says drily. And I get annoyed when journalists make snide remarks about the annoyingly pretentious shops in the neighbourhood - because I hate them just as much. Despite appearances to the contrary, Faulks is not a typical literary Leftie, however, and has voted for all three main parties at one time or another, although the Lib Dems appear to have only won his mandate on their anti-Iraq war ticket, which he describes as "a shameful episode in this country's history." "My instincts are liberal with a small 'l," but I don't buy the Labour position on the economy. State spending alone is never going to generate enough money to pull us out of the quagmire," he says. The fact is that a few thousand men - and they are mostly men - have stolen the jobs and the futures of a generation and have got away with it. I don't understand why people aren't more angry. His elder brother, Edward, now Baron Faulks, is a QC who sits in the House of Lords and takes the Conservative whip. He occasionally tries to convert Faulks but, by his own admission, it's an increasingly half-hearted attempt as the years go by. "I am a romantic," he says. In a literary way, by which I mean the Romantic poets, who thought just because a sensation is fleeting doesn't mean it isn't valuable. If the only criterion of value is whether something lasts, then the whole of human life is a waste of time. I'm also a romantic in the everyday sense. I believe that love between people is the greatest life-giving force in the world. It's intensely frustrating and inevitably makes a fool of you, but you can't stop going back to it and it's pretty much the defining experience of a human being. Another defining characteristic of Faulks is an uncertainty, which he keeps buttoned up, as an Englishman should. "I'm never free from anxiety," he says, with quiet candour. "I feel anxious about the future of the book world, or that people will say: 'That's enough of him, we want someone else." " His fall from grace isn't at all imminent. After the television adaptation of Birdsong, starring Eddie Redmayne, his stock remains enviably high, although he has described the stage and small-screen versions as "trying to make a painting from a sculpture." "I'm glad that Birdsong was well received, on the whole, and that the whole saga is over," he says, carefully. For 14 years, there have been attempts to make a feature film of the book, and I thought the television drama was a very honourable stab at it. When I mention the lingering close-ups of Eddie Redmayne's lips, it strikes a chord. Yes, yes, the lips! What is it with lips these days? His face looked too modern, because so many young people now have enormous, full lips. Is it something in the diet? The television series was made on condition that the film rights reverted to Faulks - who is now in talks with a US studio to make a film of his own. "I will never again do that thing where you sell it off and they take it over and write the script," he says. I would need to executive produce any film and co-write the screenplay - and if that means it doesn't get made, then fine. It is all, ultimately, about being in control. Most novelists crave it. "We create our own worlds so we can rule them," he says, simply. We decide what happens and who lives or dies. You can't have any more control than that. A Possible Life" by Sebastian Faulks (Hutchinson Books, £18.99) is available from Telegraph Books at £16.99 + £1.35 p&p.