Adam Thorpe’s most recent collection of poetry, Voluntary, was a Poetry Book Society Recommendation.
The Strandir coast begins with a dirt track, the guttural end of tarmac in a waste
of bared rock, grass and scree, and empty coves where great white trunks
have floated from Siberia: they litter the vast and stony strands
like matches if seen from afar, but down among them now they block our way
in booms of perimeter barriers, logs pale as the long drowned,
stripped of bark to the...
County Cork
Between the portals and the axials lay the central slab with its flotsam of euro-cents and hair-bangs, wet-scarred words, a Ryanair boarding pass kept from flight by a pebble.
Just when the grey rain cleared enough to take a photograph and find the atmospherics I’d so looked forward to, your mobile rang.
Our teenage son in Corsica, wild-camping with a hammock in the...
The dollardom shore of big Lake Michigan finds him doing what he did as a boy
by real seas, running alongside them: the land’s hem stitched, he’d look
back upon a long beach emptied by twilight (his spoor blurred as if already
old), and turn it to Avalon, or Crusoe’s island. Even on the edge of Central Africa
he had to change into somewhere else what they would always...
Adam Thorpe’s first novel, Ulverton (1992), was set in a fictional downland village, and traced its history from 17th-century isolation to M4 dormitory town. Thorpe told the story of this...
‘You,’ the mother of six-year-old Hugh informs him, ‘are the only white child in the whole of West and Central Africa, that I know of.’ The remote outpost of Empire, made...
In her recent collection Stories, Theories and Things, Christine Brooke-Rose was casting around for a generic term under which to classify such diverse novels as Midnight’s Children, Terra...
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