SOURCE: Eder, Richard. “The Eddies of Wessex.” Los Angeles Times Book Review (17 January 1993): 3, 12.

In the following review, Eder praises the wide scope and compelling characterizations in Ulverton.

We only see the wind by eddies of dust and raindrops and by the birds beating across it. Adam Thorpe strews 350 years of the shifting schemes, crafts, passions, ways of speech and walkabouts of an English village across an altering West Country landscape and social order. It allows us to believe that we have seen time.

Ulverton is a fictional village, and Ulverton is 12 fictional narratives. The place is set in what might variously be Dorset, Wiltshire or Berkshire; like Thomas Hardy, Thorpe calls it Wessex. The narratives are spaced from Cromwell's day to ours at roughly 30-year intervals.

Their time is not a thread, though, but an elastic band. Sometimes the world changes only moderately from one story to the...