Is This The Way You Said?
  • Published: 1 June 2011
  • ISBN: 9781446426937
  • Imprint: Vintage Digital
  • Format: EBook
  • Pages: 288

Is This The Way You Said?

Formats & editions
EBook
1 Jun 2011
Paperback
15 Jun 2007
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A short story collection from the highly acclaimed author of Ulverton and The Rules of Perspective.

Celebrated as a novelist of breathtaking historical range and depth, Adam Thorpe is also an accomplished and celebrated writer of short fiction, and the stories collected here show his deftness with character, his enormous versatility of voice.

In the title story, an expectant first-time novelist meets the publisher who has asked him to lunch, only to find himself drawn, unwittingly and inexorably, into a terrible personal tragedy. In 'The Concert Interval' Rob, an orchestral tympanist, sees his life crumble over the half-time coffee and sandwiches. In 'Heavy Shopping' a business executive is called in the middle of an important conference in Scotland with the news that his wife has given birth prematurely; his inability to cope with the resulting divided loyalties, and the way he deals with his own passive indecisiveness, reveals the terrifying emotional vacuum in his life.

Exquisitely written, these stories breathe life into their characters, exposing their deepest desires, their catastrophic fears, their perilous frailty in the face of the responsibilities they carry; they are the work of one of Britain's most important writers, working at the height of his powers.
  • Published: 1 June 2011
  • ISBN: 9781446426937
  • Imprint: Vintage Digital
  • Format: EBook
  • Pages: 288
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About the author

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), and six poetry collections.


www.adamthorpe.net

Also by Adam Thorpe

Words From the Wall
Missing Fay
Flight
Voluntary
Hodd
The Standing Pool
Between Each Breath
See all

Praise for Is This The Way You Said?

Full of humour and warmth, this is an impressive, at times brilliant, work

Alexander Larman, New Statesman

In Is This The Way You Said? we see the perfection of deprecation, spurred by wit, watered by pity, fed by observation. It's marvellous

Murrough O’Brien, Independent

There is grace and strength to Adam Thorpe's writing that reminds me of Tai Chi... Beautifully observed tales

Jennie Renton, Sunday Herald

Thorpe's precise prose never wastes a word; he inhabits a variety of complex characters effortlessly and is extremely funny and moving by turns. A real treat

John Harding, Daily Mail

What raises both story and collection to the highest level is the combination of Thorpe's extraordinarily keen ear, sharp humour and a remarkable, direct prose that is not only suited to the way his people think, but also provides the perfect foil to those moments of tentative poetry that spark and burn from time to time in even the dullest of English lives

John Burnside, Guardian
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