On Silbury Hill by Adam Thorpe

“It seems to me to be everything that a book ought to be or should want to be: beautiful, suggestive, personal, knowing and uncertain, old but of now, funny and modest and ripe in its lived-in ways.” Tim Dee

“fascinating” Hillary Mantel

“a rich and evocative book of place” Paul Farley, The Guardian

“a remarkable and moving mix of history, autobiography and genius loci”  William Boyd

Twenty years after the publication of his classic novel Ulverton, the acclaimed poet and novelist revisits the landscape which inspired him. It is a chalkland memoir told in fragments and family snapshots, skillfully built, layer on layer, from Britain’s ancient and modern past.

Read an extract

Paperback | 178 x 128 mm | 232 pages

Cover artwork by David Inshaw
Internal illustration by Ray Ward
Colour illustration throughout, including the art of  Paul Nash, Richard Long, Henry Moore, Joe Tilson, etc.

SKU: ONSILBHILL_PB

£10.00

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Adam Thorpe  was born in Paris in 1956 and brought up in India, Cameroon and southern England. His first collection of poetry, Mornings in the Baltic, was published in 1988 and was shortlisted for the Whitbread Poetry Award. His first novel, Ulverton, a panoramic view of rural English history, was published to great critical acclaim in 1992 and is now considered a modern classic. He has since published nine novels, five collections of poetry and two books of short stories. He has also published new translations of Flaubert’s Madame Bovary and Émile Zola’s Thérèse Raquin, had a stage play performed almost entirely in Berkshire dialect, and written numerous radio plays. He lives in France with his family and teaches at the Ecole Supérieure des Beaux Arts de Nîmes and at the University of Nîmes.

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