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Ulverton [Paperback]

Adam Thorpe (Author)
4.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (16 customer reviews)

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Book Description

Publication Date: 6 May 1993

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 Cromell...

Told through diaries, sermons, letters, drunken pub conversations and film scripts this is a masterful novel that reconstructs the unrecorded history of England.

(19980612)

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Product details

  • Paperback: 400 pages
  • Publisher: Vintage; New edition edition (6 May 1993)
  • Language: English
  • ISBN-10: 0749397047
  • ISBN-13: 978-0749397043
  • Product Dimensions: 12.7 x 2.5 x 19.7 cm
  • Average Customer Review: 4.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (16 customer reviews)
  • Amazon Bestsellers Rank: 141,493 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Review

From its first page, you're aware that you are in the presence of a writer with exceptional gifts. By the final one, you know he has used them to create a masterpiece (Peter Kemp Sunday Times )

If you believe English fiction is jaded, you must read Adam Thorpe... Tender, precise, tragicomic and unsentimental (Hilary Mantel Independent on Sunday )

We aren't used to the many deep matters Thorpe touches on, nor to such a thorough grasp of the complex nature of our rural past, and through it, of all existence itself... Suddenly English lives again (John Fowles Guardian )

These stories sing like psalms, robust and vibrant - a poet's novel and a celebration that no social historian would dare attempt (Observer )

One of the great British fictional works of our time (LA Times )

Book Description

The sensational debut novel by Adam Thorpe, now regarded as a 20th century classic.
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Customer Reviews

4.2 out of 5 stars
16 reviews
4.2 out of 5 stars
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
18 of 18 people found the following review helpful
5.0 out of 5 stars A very good book indeed! 19 Jan 2000
By A Customer
Format:Paperback|Amazon Verified Purchase
This book kept me reading through its various changes of voice. After a slighter initial story the book quickly picks up with its different tones and experiences. Particularly striking are narratives in the voice of the Book of Common Prayer and from the year 1887. This book is worth savouring and revisiting. It presents a highly moral collection of stories, with a vivid sense of humour and grasp of thought processes. It is fascinating to listen to people deluding themselves about their motives. I would advise you to read it.
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28 of 29 people found the following review helpful
5.0 out of 5 stars For want of a nail ... 5 Mar 2004
By Dr. Kenneth W. Douglas
Format:Paperback
"Ulverton" must be the most remarkable first novel published in the U.K. for many long years, and certainly has a place on my all-time Top Ten. Like so much of Thorpe's work, it is about the crucial things never said, things never known that fall into the gap between real human lives and recorded history: the twelve linked stories which make up the novel read almost like "dead letters" never sent, from a succession of remarkable historical voices.

Structurally, the book is fascinating: this is Thorpe at his most thrillingly experimental (I do feel, after the equally fine "Still", he has lost his edge a little in his later work). This is a novel composed of a series of twelve short stories, which are mainly first-person accounts by a variety of motley characters from the sixteenth to the late twentieth century, all living in the vicinity of the fictional English village of Ulverton. The characters and events mentioned in each story recur unexpectedly in following stories, but time moves forwards forty or fifty years each chapter: this allows Thorpe to show us the gap between the historical perception of people and their true lives and motivations, with both irony and pathos.

Above all, Thorpe accurately captures the random, literally chaotic nature of history (the flap of a butterfly's wings, etc.) - as the nursery rhyme tells us, the want of a nail ultimately caused the loss of the battle, and the cover art here is wonderfully appropriate.

If this all sounds a bit dry, I should say that Thorpe has a remarkable gift for getting into his character's heads and capturing their very different voices, and he gives us a succession of remarkably moving, sometimes tragic tales. This is real living history, and a thrillingly original read.

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20 of 21 people found the following review helpful
5.0 out of 5 stars History Today 14 Nov 2000
By A Customer
Format:Paperback
This is a breathtaking book which traces the history of the fictitious English village of Ulverton via a series of short stories. It gives a real sense of how the present is the sum of all things past, and the way in which real events can be distorted and misinterpreted by history. This is one of those very few books that really can change the way you look at life - I read it seven years ago, and the insights gained are as fresh now as they were then.
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Most Recent Customer Reviews
5.0 out of 5 stars Astonishing virtuosity, a series of prose-poems to planet Earth.
I found out about this extraordinary book more or less by accident, and can't understand why it's not better known, and its author not more famous. Read more
Published 3 months ago by Dr. John R. Truscott
5.0 out of 5 stars Ancestral voices - an elegy in chalk
This is a remarkable evocation of the past in a cycle of twelve fragments, episodes, or stories spanning over 300 years and centred on the village of Ulverton, somewhere in the... Read more
Published 4 months ago by Glimmung
3.0 out of 5 stars Good on mood, light on plot
I bought this when it was first published but hadn't got around to reading it (which means nothing - there are far too many books I buy and don't read for a while). Read more
Published 9 months ago by Girl with a book
5.0 out of 5 stars History at basic human level
I have just finished rereading Ulverton. The first reading was about ten years ago, and several of the episodes, and several sharp images, had stuck in my mind since then,... Read more
Published 21 months ago by Anthony Peter Swallow
3.0 out of 5 stars impressive but ...
despite the fact that the author has impressively written a book about a village in the south of England spanning over 300 years, and that each chapter is a story on its own in its... Read more
Published on 12 Aug 2009 by allesteer
5.0 out of 5 stars Delightful
What a breath of fresh air this book is. I have read it three times in as many years and each time it has brought me something new.
Published on 21 May 2009 by Mr. D. A. Chettleburgh
5.0 out of 5 stars Thought provoking
This book is with me for the rest of my life. I drive past a village (any village) and I see a church tower or a beautiful field, an old man, a war memorial, or a ramshackle pub... Read more
Published on 19 Jun 2008 by Sian
5.0 out of 5 stars not just clever
Quite apart from being a stylistic and structural tour de force, this is the sort of book that brings history to life. Read more
Published on 17 May 2008 by Michael Scuffil
1.0 out of 5 stars Too much like hard work
I bought this book on the strength of the glowing reviews it has attracted. I am a fairly dogged reader but I'm afraid I failed to finish it. Read more
Published on 19 Mar 2008 by James Cruise
5.0 out of 5 stars Absolutely fascinating
There are so many different layers and strands of this dense book to enjoy. The language is marvellously evocative, although I really had to concentrate to get the full meaning... Read more
Published on 12 Sep 2007 by Ms. M. J. Taylor
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