Synopses & Reviews
The reissue in Vintage Classics marks the 20th anniversary of first publication.
At the heart of this novel lies the fictional village of Ulverton. It is the fixed point in a book that spans three hundred years. Different voices tell the story of Ulverton: one of Cromwell's soldiers staggers home to find his wife remarried and promptly disappears, an eighteenth century farmer carries on an affair with a maid under his wife's nose, a mother writes letters to her imprisoned son, a 1980s real estate company discover a soldier's skeleton, dated to the time of Cromwell.
Told through diaries, sermons, letters, drunken pub conversations and film scripts this is a masterful novel that reconstructs the unrecorded history of England.
Synopsis
Made up of twelve self-contained narratives set in the fictional village of Ulverton from 1650 to 1988, each section of the novel, with the exception of the final chapter, has a narrator who is also the principle character. Chapters take the form of a diary, a narrators stream-of-consciousness, a series of letters and a traditional first person narrative.
Ulverton is extraordinary in scope and ambition and the imaginative way that it deals with three centuries of seemingly authentic private experiences in rural England.
About the Author
Poet, playwright and novelist Adam Thorpe was born in Paris in 1956 and grew up in India, Cameroon and England. After graduating from Magdalen College, Oxford, in 1979, he started a theatre company and toured villages and schools before moving to London where he taught Drama and English Literature. His first collection of poetry,
Mornings in the Baltic (1988), was shortlisted for the 1988 Whitbread Poetry Award. His other books of poetry are
Meeting Montaigne (1990) and
From the Neanderthal (1999). He was awarded an Eric Gregory Award in 1985.
Thorpe's first novel, Ulverton (1992), was published to great critical acclaim and won the Winifred Holtby Memorial Prize in 1992. Following this were the novels Still (1995) and Pieces of Light (1998). In 2000 he published a book of short stories, Shifts (2000), and then another novel, Nineteen Twenty-One (2001). Adam's latest novel, No Telling, is published in 2003.
Adam Thorpe lives in France with his wife and three children.