SOURCE: Clark, Alex. “Occupational Gambits.” Times Literary Supplement, no. 5049 (7 January 2000): 19.

In the following review, Clark praises Thorpe's subject matter and prose in Shifts, though criticizes his self-conscious preoccupation with technique and detail.

The theme that links the twelve stories in Adam Thorpe's new book [Shifts] is a simple enough one. Work, the occupation that takes up most of the time of most people, that can be both enslavement and liberation, and that can accurately define or hopelessly obscure a personality or a life, becomes, in Thorpe's hands, the starting point for an examination of a dozen lives.

Thorpe avoids the more obvious temptations of the modern job; there is no e-commerce here, no computer programmer or personnel officer, no advertising guru or media whore. Glitziness is confined to a purveyor of luxury swimming pools, who is locked into a moral struggle over whether to sell her parched family...