Description
Book Synopsis''An intricately crafted novel, sharp-eared, current and full of heart'' Guardian, Books of the Year
A spirited fourteen-year-old, Fay, goes missing from a Lincoln council estate. Is she a runaway, or a victim another face on a poster gradually fading with time? 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.
David is on a family holiday on the bleak Lincolnshire coast; Howard, a retired steel worker with some dodgy friends; Cosmina, a Romanian immigrant; Sheena, middle-aged and single, running a kiddies' clothes shop; Mike, owner of a second-hand bookshop and secretly in love with Cosmina; and Chris, a TV-producer-become-monk struggling to leave the ordinary world behind. All are involuntary witnesses to the lost girl; paths cross, threads touch, connections are made or lost. Is Fay alive or dead? Or somewhere in between?
Trade ReviewTwenty-five years on from his spectacular debut novel,
Ulverton, Thorpe has produced a book that resembles and rivals it…
With tremendous flair, Thorpe opens up a vista of present-day middle England. -- Peter Kemp * Sunday Times, Books of the Year *
An
intricately crafted novel, sharp-eared, current and full of heart. * Guardian, Books of the Year *
Missing Fay…presents entwined provincial lives with
illuminating precision, its prose textured, its structure intricate… He is alert to every English linguistic twitch, every slippery folk-meme.
He’s a writer’s writer, and I wish he were a reader’s writer too. -- Hilary Mantel * Times Literary Supplement *
Is Thorpe Britain’s most underrated writer? Having just re-read his 1992 classic novel
Ulverton, I say he has to be in the running -- John Burnside
Thorpe is
a master of quiet ironies, of exquisite detail…
This is a mysterious, lucent novel, compelling in its tautness, devastating in its wisdom. I hope it wins prizes. -- Philip Womack * Spectator *
