Product Description

A dozen accounts, narrated by a dozen different voices, tell the story of Ulverton, a fictional village on the Wessex Downs, through its generations. Based on a bedrock of folktales, myth and oral tradition, the author builds layers of new narrative, often using dialect or the true demotic voice.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #28222 in Books
• Published on: 1993-05-06
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 384 pages

Customer Reviews

A very good book indeed!
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.

For want of a nail ...
"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.

History Today
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.