Reviews

Ulverton by Adam Thorpe

elisatin's review

adventurous challenging slow-paced

• Plot- or character-driven? Character
• Strong character development? No
• Loveable characters? It's complicated
• Diverse cast of characters? Yes
• Flaws of characters a main focus? No

4.5

You have to invest some time and effort into reading this, but I think it's worth it! There is lots of historical detail, and you get to see how local myths and legends are passed down through the generations. Each chapter is unique in style and content - so you don't follow the same characters throughout but rather the history of the village over several centuries! 

anonblueberry's review against another edition

This is the first book that I remember not finishing.
Honestly, I've not read such self aggrandising, pretentious twattery in my life (and I had to do a "literary fiction" module full of angsty white middle aged authors projecting onto their characters at uni)

dave_holwill's review against another edition

5.0

There are points in this book where you may not want to carry on, but it really does pay off in the end. Well worth fighting through some of the more rurally voiced chapters.
Excellent document of a disappearing world.

oliviall's review against another edition

2.0

2.5 really. Although some of the individual passages were well written, I really didn't enjoy this at all. The sections with local dialect were just too challenging to read for very little return to the reader. I like the premise of the book, with the same place featuring through time from 17oo's until the present day, but found it focused more on the people rather than the place and it didn't engage me or give me a sense of the place through time. It's difficult when the sections are so disparate and rather obscure. My favourite section was near the end, set at the start of WW1. I thought this was very well written. The very last part is impossible to read on the Kindle version but I tried my best. All in all an unsatisfying read.

alldebooks's review against another edition

3.0

I have raced through this, very good evocation of voices from different time periods around the location of Ulverton. It reads as 12 distinct short stories rather than a collective novel which I would have personally preferred.

rodillagrande's review

challenging emotional reflective slow-paced

• Plot- or character-driven? Character
• Strong character development? No
• Diverse cast of characters? No

luluallison's review

A lovely, meditative book, moves through time with the slow, undeniable purchase of a river flowing through the land.

zoer03's review

2.0

Ok so the good things about this novel... I love the sense of the change of time over the centuries in one small village like the changing of the seasons. I love how as you go through the centuries the language in the book changes with each new decade though I found the last part of the book incredibly irritating and just plain batty also I couldn’t actually read the last bit because it was script and I was reading it on kindle it felt like a waste as I had no idea what the ending was like because it was too small. I also found certain ye olde English extremely trying and just annoying as hell. So by the end I just wanted to finish it not caring if I actually read the last few pages. So ok but not great

roba's review

3.0

Lots of this is really, really good historical writing that brings olden days people vividly to etc. etc. etc. but Jesus, some of these olden days people do go on a bit. I know that's down to the authenticity of a series of 18th century letters or an old bloke talking to you in the pub or whatever, but you can give that impression while still editing a bit. And then a couple of chapters have the opposite problem – those in dialect aren't really long enough for you to get the hang of reading them fluently (or at least aren't artfully enough constructed – Alan Moore or Paul Kingsnorth will have you reading what looks like nonsense at first glance within a couple of pages). And the TV script chapter – I'm sure it was fun to look up all the shot abbreviations, but again, you could edit anything that's not a crash zoom.

So three quarters really good, but I skipped the rest.