Books by Adam Thorpe

Adam Thorpe was born in Paris in 1956. His first novel, Ulverton, appeared in 1992 and he has published two books of stories and ten further novels, most recently Missing Fay (2017). Words from the Wall is his seventh poetry collection.

'An intricately crafted novel, sharp-eared, current and full of heart' Guardian, Books of the YearA spirited fourteen-year-old, Fay, goes missing from a Lincoln council estate. 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.

It is April 1945, and the historic town of Lohenfelde is about to be overrun by the Allied Third Army. 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.

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 MantelAt the heart of this novel lies the fictional village of Ulverton.

Bob Winrush used to fly passengers, then worked for years as a 'freight dog', flying consignments of goods and sometimes people to all the corners of the world - including bush-strips in war zones: 'real flying,' as he called it.

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.

With the attentive care of an archaeologist he uncovers and examines fragments - from a personal history or the historic past - and rebuilds the narrative: a fossil in Hitler's stadium, a wedding photograph, marks on the wall where an eighteenth-century priest was shot.

Who was Robin Hood? Romantic legend casts him as hero of the people, living in Sherwood Forest with Friar Tuck, Little John and Maid Marian. This title describes his time as a boy in the greenwood with a half-crazed bandit Robert Hodd - who, following principles of the 'heresy of the Free Spirit', believes himself above God and beyond sin.

Jack Middleton, once 'England's most promising young composer' now lives comfortably in Hampstead with his wife Milly, an heiress. Jack is no longer young nor has he ever quite fulfilled his remarkable promise.

Presents a collection of stories that expose the characters' deepest desires, their catastrophic fears, and their perilous frailty in the face of the responsibilities they carry.

Whether walking an abandoned road or considering a friend's suicide, his poems remind us of our abdications, of our collapsed relationships with nature, with history, with ourselves. There are, however, all the vestiges of connective tissue - memories and mementoes, sudden, miraculous leaps of beauty.

Set in 1968 in the Parisian suburbs, No Telling is narrated by twelve-year-old Gilles as he approaches his Solemn Communion, puberty, and some sense of the chaos around him.

Adam Thorpe's fourth collection continues his engagement with history: the living continuum that connects us with our near and distant past, nourishing and illuminating our present. Performing his unique archaeology on lives lived, Adam Thorpe once again displays the range of his imagination and the depth of his humanity.

In a language deeply soaked in the time and by means of a beguiling story which gradually haunts its own process, Nineteen Twenty-One vividly recreates the year in which The Waste Land was written, as well as offering a bright mirror to the inner and outer complexities of our own troubled times.

' outwardly the unfilmable script of a would-be English cineste, one Richard Arthur Thornby currently lecturing in Texas on the cinema. He airs a hypothetical movie of both his own American present and his middle-class English families past. . ' John Fowles