SOURCE: Fern, Nicholas. “The Power of the Workplace.” Spectator 284, no. 8946 (22 January 2000): 36.

In the following review, Fern praises the compelling characterizations in Shifts.

When today's graduates enter the so-called ‘real world’, the first difference they notice is the divergence of their working persona from the one they are reluctantly forced to reserve for evenings and weekends. In this collection of stories by Adam Thorpe, [Shifts,] on the other hand, an account of an individual's working life is the best exegesis of his character. The approach succeeds because the writer of Ulverton has a fine ear for legend, but also, in part, because his stories are set in the days when jobs were still trades. There are no call-centres or sales conferences in these pages. The inanities of modern corporate life are largely ignored. This may be with good reason, for they are perhaps a fitting subject only for satire...