Missing Fay

A mysterious haunting novel starring a cast of brilliant eccentrics bound together by a missing girl

Twenty-five years on from his spectacular debut novel, Ulverton, Thorpe has produced a book that resembles and rivals it… With tremendous flair, Thorpe opens up a vista of present-day middle England.

An intricately crafted novel, sharp-eared, current and full of heart.

Missing Fay…presents entwined provincial lives with illuminating precision, its prose textured, its structure intricate… He is alert to every English linguistic twitch, every slippery folk-meme. He’s a writer’s writer, and I wish he were a reader’s writer too.

Is Thorpe Britain’s most underrated writer? Having just re-read his 1992 classic novel Ulverton, I say he has to be in the running

Thorpe is a master of quiet ironies, of exquisite detail… This is a mysterious, lucent novel, compelling in its tautness, devastating in its wisdom. I hope it wins prizes.

Not only Britain’s most underrated writer, he is also among the most original… [Missing Fay] is believable, human, sustained by characterisation, nuanced prose and a robust, natural humanity all of its own. Further evidence, as if needed, that Adam Thorpe is a very fine writer indeed. Novelists don’t have to be accomplished poets, yet it clearly helps.

Missing Fay is a book of lives… Thorpe draws each character with economy, empathy, depth of perception and, notwithstanding the subject matter, great humour… He presents human existence in all its isolation and odd interconnectedness, and he does so with a poet’s eye for language, a short-story writer’s gift for compassion and a novelist’s overarching perspective. He is one of modern English fiction’s standout talents.

If the missing girl trope belongs to crime fiction, the ambiguity here makes for a richer and more haunting experience. There are plenty of suspects, and a second read reveals connections you won’t get on the first. The mystery of the missing girl cleverly connects lives that rarely intersect… Thorpe’s teeming free-indirect style interweaves a tapestry of prejudices… This is a clear-sighted work of art. With great empathy it imagines lives which, hidden from each other, are revealed in their common causes to the reader; if Thorpe is right, a better world, while unlikely, is possible.

One of those rare writers who can do the magic of completely disappearing and letting his characters…speak for themselves… Thorpe is not a regular fixture on literary prize shortlists. Surely that will change with this engrossing, unforgettable work of wonder.

Adam Thorpe’s superb new novel will put this gifted novelist back on the map... A tour-de-force of depth and nuance... Missing Fay is superb on many levels... A vivid portrait of a particular locality, a psychological study of overlapping lives, a pitch-perfect piece of ventriloquism...and a sweeping conspectus of contemporary concerns.

Thorpe’s ability to inhabit [his] disparate characters is hugely impressive, and he excels at charting the often volatile mood swings within a relationship.

Adam Thorpe is a wonderfully sympathetic novelist with a keen eye and alert ear... You cannot but admire and enjoy his ability to portray such a variety of people and to explore the randomness of barely-connected experiences. It’s a novel that demands, and deserves, to be read slowly, with close attention.

Missing Fay is a welcome and timely work about loneliness and alienation in a rootless, restless England. In years to come, when we are trying to understand the complexities that led from “Broken Britain” to Brexit, this thoughtful, unsettling and intricate novel may well provide some of the answers.

A vibrant ensembles piece unfolding around the disappearance of a teenage girl… Missing Fay… inhabits each of its characters one chapter at a time – a...vivid approach that affords a steady pulse of dramatic irony as well as a measure of suspense… [A] rich novel of loose ends.

There is no typical Adam Thorpe novel… Missing Fay defies categorisation and shows off his finest literary tricks.

Fluent and prolific, he ranges easily between voices and subjects… threaded together with care and panache… Most of the men in the novel…entertain fantasies about vulnerable women… In Missing Fay, Thorpe attempts, with typical self-effacement, to give them a voice of their own.

It’s wry, visceral, angry and wise.

If you believe that English fiction is jaded, you must read Adam Thorpe

An intricately crafted novel, sharp-eared, current and full of heart, about a lost teenager in a lost England.

An upmarket take on the Gone Girl mystery.

With tremendous flair, Thorpe opens up a vista of present-day middle England.

Adam Thorpe was born in Paris in 1956. His first novel, Ulverton, appeared in 1992, and he has published two books of stories, six poetry collections, and nine further novels, most recently Flight (2012). 
 
 
www.adamthorpe.net

'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?

The Rules Of Perspective

It is April 1945, and the historic town of Lohenfelde is about to be overrun by the Allied Third Army. Huddled in the vaults of the Kaiser-Wilhelm Museum are Heinrich Hoffer and his three colleagues. Their petty rivalries and resentments surface quickly in this claustrophobic confinement as the four prepare themselves for their fate. 
 
Above the ground, picking through the rubble, is Corporal Neal Parry, who wishes he was back in West Virginia studying art. When he finds an exquisite painting in what remains of the museum vaults, he is immediately reconnected with a lost world of beauty and order. It is this small 18th-century oil that is the poignant link between the young American soldier and the four charred corpses he finds at the same time. As the narratives interweave, the story of the painting reveals the hidden story of Herr Hoffer and his three associates - and in doing so uncovers other, darker mysteries.

Flight

A breakneck, knuckle-whitening thriller, written with absolute brilliance - pooh to the Man Booker judges if this is not on the shortlist - Kate Saunders, The Times

In Flight's slick plot and its testosterone-fuelled characters, Thorpe has found a fresh way of looking at corruption and betrayal, and the sticky web that is flung across the world, connecting drug and arms dealers, and all shades of mortals in between

This book is so much better written than most thrillers that it's almost ridiculous

A gripping thriller from its first sentence…. Thorpe is a craftsman as well as an artist, and the book is well put together, with respect for the genre. Like William Boyd, Thorpe is a thorough professional. Thorpe convincingly portrays a world in which the means of communication have shrunk the world and made privacy hard to secure

Flight blends an unlikely cocktail of genres with great success – think 007 as a middle-aged dad you’re halfway there

An excellently plotted book boosted by some fine writing

Thorpe’s skill is with sharply observed characters… Taut and compelling

A well-written and exciting Boy’s Own tale for adults

Bob Winrush was a freight dog, flying consignments of goods and sometimes people to all the corners of the world.Until, one day, he walked away from a deal that didn't smell right - something a 'freight dog’ should never do. 
 
Now working as a private pilot for an Emirate prince in Dubai, he finds that moment of refusal catching up with him. Caught between those who want to find out more and those who want to cover their traces, he becomes a marked man, and flees to a remote Scottish island. Pursued by both armed assassins and a ruinous, bitter divorce, he struggles to re-fashion himself in this barren, beautiful place, taking on another identity. 
 
But back in the world of smuggled AK-47s and heroin, the stakes are rising. Even in the furthest Hebrides his past catches up with him, and the predators are closing in.

Ulverton

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

If you believe English fiction is jaded, you must read Adam Thorpe... Tender, precise, tragicomic and unsentimental.

We arent used to the many deep matters Thorpe touches on, not to such a thorough grasp of the complex nature of our rural past, and through it, of all existence itself... Suddenly English lives again

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

A superb and moving meditation on history, fate and the nature of time, Ulverton is at once a traditional fiction and a wholly successful testing of the limits of literary art

Spanning three centuries and encompassing a startling variety of lives, this debut novel from poet Adam Thorpe is nothing less than a bravura performance... With Ulverton, Thorpe has woven his own enticing 'secret web'. This is no mere promising first novel, but a major work, heralding a brillant new voice in British fiction

Beneath the variety of Ulverton's episodes is the current that links them, and that makes this one of the great British fictional works of our time. Each voice gives us a richly accomplished story; as one voice follows another, we are given the waxing and waning of history, of the land, and of the ways in which society regards itself and the world it disposes of

A masterpiece...he has done a thing I would literally have given my right arm to do

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

Voluntary

A new collection of poetry from one of England's most gifted writers.

He writes like a man in love with language, with the sheer possibilities of words. His work is musical, brimming with slant rhyme and assonance, and also subtle in its effects...dazzling

Best known for poetry and fiction that digs deep into the mythic layers of the English landscape, he weaves together past and present, grief and wonder, with delicacy and grace

Thorpe’s language is musical, open-hearted and extremely polished…this book as a whole is almost novelistic in its thematic quality, bringing forth ideas about time, presence and absence

From an abandoned rowing boat in Estonia full of wild flowers to a swimming pool in the Congo full of drowned insects, Adam Thorpe's new collection takes us on a wide-ranging journey through states of gain and loss, alienation and belonging. In the title poem, the poet disturbs a flock of geese by his mere presence, and one goose takes the wrong direction, away from the flock, as a 'voluntary exile'. A bid for freedom, or a mistake? 
 
These poems explore our chances, record our traces - in the marks on skin, home movies, stone walls, the pressure of our blood, or the clearing of a dying father's study: 'foraging backwards' until something is revealed, however tentative. As always in Thorpe's work, history's violence lurks in the margins: in the silent oppression of Roman roads, a polluting pipeline in Africa or the bombing of the Alcala train, he takes the gauge of our wider compulsions, of all that decides things for us. Against this he sets what, through the other meaning of 'voluntary', suggests chance's extempore music: the gleeful play of a sea-otter, the extraordinary gift of a passing gull to his small daughter, or poetry itself. 
 
Adam Thorpe is now celebrated as a novelist, but he began as a poet. Voluntary, his sixth collection, is a timely reminder of the elegance, skill and remarkable range of this most gifted British poet.

Pieces Of Light

A fascinating fictional investigation into the resonance of the past, both personal and ancient.

Hugh Arkwright's remote childhood in the Central African bush, and its sudden disruption, leaves him with a legacy of magic, mystery, and tragic loss. Late in his life, he returns to the gaunt house in Ulverton where he was brought up by his eccentric uncle, and finds that the old ghosts still walk. The more he excavates his own past, the deeper he finds the traces of ancient horrors. The autumnal air of Ulverton begins to take on the taint of corruption, and a mystery starts that ends with vengeance, murder and a sudden, staggering revelation. The mild English manners of the village of darkness beneath the heart of oak. PIECES OF LIGHT is a modern novel steeped in a resonant past; where rural England and colonial Africa collide. Densely wrought and vividly imagined, Adam Thorpe's return to Ulverton is a fictional triumph - thrilling and unforgettable.

Adam Thorpe

Adam Thorpe is a long-sighted poet, at home with the ancient and the modern, and with an extraordinary field of vision. [Words from the Wall is a] first-class collection – which repays rereading.

This is a collection in which time is almost entirely fluid; one in which the past and the present frequently coexist in the space of a few lines. Yet it is also one which mines the deep pathos of the passage of time, and those feeling the effects of its inexorable advance.

These remarkable poems are despatches from the edges of experience: from the remote coast of northern Iceland where tree-trunks and dead whales lie beached, to the furthest outposts of the Roman empire in the title poem – ‘From the very limit of the world,/Flavius sends you greetings, my lord.’ The collection is concerned with borders and brinks – the liminal spaces where distinctions blur between outer and inner, known and unknown, between what is familiar and what is other. This is the terrain of the displaced and deracinated but also the shimmering space where all is volatile, mutable, in flux – and it is also, of course, the thin, transparent veil between waking and sleep, between life and death. 
 
Shadowed by mortality, lit by lyrical grace, Words from the Wall includes poems about the killing fields of Agincourt, Flanders, Vietnam and a memorial poem to the victims of the 2015 Bataclan attack where the dead are ‘stations of flame’, and it begins and ends at the boundaries of the Roman territory, at the edge of life: ‘The girls I laughed with once/in the baths’ atrium/are withered and wattle-necked./I love them still…’

Adam Thorpe

Praise for Words From the Wall

Adam Thorpe is a long-sighted poet, at home with the ancient and the modern, and with **an extraordinary field of vision. [Words from the Wall is a] first-class collection – which repays rereading.**

This is a collection in which time is almost entirely fluid; one in which the past and the present frequently coexist in the space of a few lines. Yet it is also one which mines the deep pathos of the passage of tim ...

Books by Adam Thorpe

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