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Immerse yourself in the stories of Ulverton, as heard on BBC Radio 4 Book at Bedtime 'Sometimes you forget that it is a novel, and believe for a moment that you are really hearing the voice of the dead' Hilary Mantel 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. WITH AN INTRODUCTION FROM ROBERT MACFARLANE
Two Cambridge academics, the historians Nick and Sarah Mallinson, take a sabbatical with their three small and lively girls in a remote Languedoc farmhouse. But the farmhouse contains its own histories, far darker and murkier than the Mallinsons are used to dealing with. As the illusion of Eden retreats, the couple begin to feel the vulnerability of being among strangers...
Who was Robin Hood? Romantic legend casts him as outlaw, archer, and hero of the people, living in Sherwood Forest with Friar Tuck, Little John and Maid Marian, stealing from the rich to give to the poor - but there is no historical proof to back this up. The early ballads portray a quite different figure: impulsive, violent, vengeful, with no concern for the needy, no merry band, and no Maid Marian. Hodd provides a possible answer to this famous question, in the form of a medieval document rescued from a ruined church on the Somme, and translated from the original Latin. The testimony of an anonymous monk, it describes his time as a boy in the greenwood with a half-crazed bandit called Robe...
'An intricately crafted novel, sharp-eared, current and full of heart' Guardian, Books of the Year A spirited fourteen-year-old, Fay, goes missing from a Lincoln council estate. Is she a runaway, or a victim – another face on a poster gradually fading with time? The story of her last few days before she vanishes is interwoven with the varied lives of six locals – all touched in life-changing ways. David is on a family holiday on the bleak Lincolnshire coast; Howard, a retired steel worker with some dodgy friends; Cosmina, a Romanian immigrant; Sheena, middle-aged and single, running a kiddies’ clothes shop; Mike, owner of a second-hand bookshop and secretly in love with Cosmina; and Chris, a TV-producer-become-monk struggling to leave the ordinary world behind. All are involuntary witnesses to the lost girl; paths cross, threads touch, connections are made or lost. Is Fay alive or dead? Or somewhere in between?
Leaving London's cosmopolitanism in 1990 for a new life in rural south-west France, Adam Thorpe settled with his family in an ancient part of the Cévennes, a rugged landscape between the mountains and the sea. Here, amongst memories of religious conflict and Nazi savagery, alongside escapees of the 1968 Paris revolts and villagers deeply committed to their inheritance, Thorpe now makes his life as a writer. In his memoir Thorpe describes an author's existence embedded within an almost unrecognisably rustic setting and an impoverished yet proud local community. At the heart of his amusing yet profound account is a deep affection for the natural environment and the people that surround him, as well as a genuine fear for what the future may hold for them both.
Drawing on the mystery thriller traditions of Buchan and Wilkie Collins, this novel is steeped in a past where rural England and colonial Africa collide. It centres on the character of Hugh Arkwright, who had a remote childhood in the Central African bush.
Once Èngland'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.
During the freakishly hot, drought summer of 1921, a young writer is holed up in a cottage in the Chilterns, striving to write the first great novel of the War, impelled by his own suffering. In what sense can art be made out of such horror?
Adam Thorpe is a novelist and poet, whose books include the ground-breaking Ulverton.