Adam Thorpe

Once England's most promising young composer' - now living comfortably in Hampstead with his wife Milly, an heiress - Jack Middleton is in mid-life decline, his career in free-fall. When he visits Estonia for a three-week search for inspiration, he falls for a young waitress called Kaja, deeply bound up in the suffering of her country and the joy and danger of its new freedom. They embark on a passionate affair on a lonely island in a time warp. Then it's over.

Wenn die Seen schweigen, kommt der stille Tod. Ein Mann, der seine Tochter sucht und dabei seine Identität verliert. Ein Mädchen, das seit sechs Jahren reglos aus dem Fenster schaut und darauf wartet, dass ihr jemand den Schlüssel zu ihrer Erinnerung bringt. Vier Männer und eine Mission, die aus Hunger und Disziplin besteht und keine Opfer scheut. Ein Winter in Deutschland, ein See im Wald und Schatten, die sich unter dem Eis bewegen.

At the heart of this extraordinary novel lies the fictional village of Ulverton on the Wessex Downs of England: the fixed point in the book's 300-year cycle of history, both its backdrop and its central character. A dozen accounts, narrated by a dozen different voices, tell the story of Ulverton through the generations: a soldier in Cromwell's army returns to find his wife remarried, and promptly vanishes; an eighteenth-century farmer introduces scientific planting methods and carries on an affair with a maid under his wife's nose; during a 1980s TV documentary, real estate developers discover a soldier's skeleton, dated to the time of Cromwell ... Starting from a bedrock of folk tale, myth, and oral tradition, Adam Thorpe builds his narrative out of diaries, sermons, drunken pub conversations, letters, and film scripts - each of them evoking the style and substance of its particular era, and all threaded through with recurrent motifs and images. The result is a dense, richly allusive portrait of the village as palimpsest, with its stories written onto place and into time. Highly inventive, darkly erotic, by turns hilarious and deeply moving, Adam Thorpe's novel, a best seller in England, is a brilliant performance which offers the reader a creative role as one more participant in the ongoing drama that is Ulverton.

An idyllic, old farmhouse in France is the background to a gripping story suffused with tension. Two Oxford historians, Johnny and Sarah Thomson, take a sabbatical with their three small and lively girls in a remote and beautiful old farmhouse in the hills of Languedoc. But the farmhouse has its own histories, rather more fraught and alive than those the Thomsons are used to dealing with on the page. As the illusion of Eden retreats, the Thomsons start to feel the vulnerability of being aliens in this unpredictable wildness. While Sarah frets about the danger of the swimming pool and the night-time visits of well-tusked boars, Johnny is more concerned by the locals -- particularly Jean-Luc, the gardener. Is his taste for hammering tiny nails into dolls, collecting arcane rubbish, and secretly photographing Sarah, more than a harmless pastime? And how should they react to his eager befriending of their girls?

"Adam Thorpe's home for the past 27 years has been an old house in the lower Cevennes, a wild range of mountains in southern France that forms part of the Massif Central. In his writing Thorpe has explored this area, drawing on the legends, history and above all the people of this part of France for his inspiration. In particular he is interested in how the past leaves impressions--marks--on our landscape and on us. What do we find in the grass, earth and stone beneath our feet and in the objects around us? What traces have been left behind and what marks do we leave now? He finds a fossil imprinted in the single worked stone of his house's front doorstep, explores the attic once used as a silk factory, finds priest-holes and the graves of two sisters in the garden and excavates the blade of a Catholic dragoon's lance. Then there are the personal fragments that make up a life and a family history, memories dredged up by 'dusty toys, dried-up poster paints, a painted clay lump in the bottom of a box.' Part celebration of rustic France, part personal memoir, Thorpe's humorous and precise prose demonstrates a wonderful stylist at work"--

Was Robin Hood a good guy or a bad guy? A long-hidden document casts doubt on our pre-conceptions about a medieval folk hero when the written testimony of a monk named Matthew is rescued from a ruined church on the Somme and describes life with the half-crazed, murderous bandit Hodd.