Madame Bovary is one of the greatest, most beguiling novels ever written. Emma Bovary is an avid reader of sentimental novels; brought up on a Normandy farm and convent-educated, she longs for romance. At first, Emma pins her hopes on marriage, but life with her well-meaning husband in the provinces leaves her bored and dissatisfied. She seeks escape through extravagant spending sprees and, eventually, adultery. As Emma pursues her impossible reverie she seals her own ruin. 'A great novel that is also an inexhaustible pleasure to read' Guardian A NEW TRANSLATION BY ADAM THORPE VINTAGE FRENCH CLASSICS - six masterpieces of French fiction in collectable editions.

Adam Thorpe's home for the past 25 years has been an old house in the Cévennes, a wild range of mountains in southern France. Prior to this, in an ancient millhouse in the oxbow of a Cévenol river, he wrote the novel that would become the Booker Prize-nominated Ulverton, now a Vintage Classic.

In more recent writing Thorpe has explored the Cévennes, drawing on the legends, history and above all the people of this part of France for his inspiration. In his charming journal, Notes from the Cévennes, Thorpe takes up these themes, writing about his surroundings, the village and his house at the heart of it, as well as the contrasts of city life in nearby Nîmes. In particular he is interested in how the past leaves impressions - marks - on our landscape and on us. What do we find in the grass, earth and stone beneath our feet and in the objects around us? How do they tie us to our forebears? What traces have been left behind and what marks do we leave now?

He finds a fossil imprinted in the single worked stone of his house's front doorstep, explores the attic once used as a silk factory and contemplates the stamp of a chance paw in a fragment of Roman roof-tile. Elsewhere, he ponders mutilated fleur-de-lys (French royalist symbols) in his study door and unwittingly uses the tomb-rail of two sisters buried in the garden as a gazebo. Then there are the personal fragments that make up a life and a family history: memories dredged up by 'dusty toys, dried-up poster paints, a painted clay lump in the bottom of a box.'

Part celebration of both rustic and urban France, part memoir, Thorpe's humorous and precise prose shows a wonderful stylist at work, recalling classics such as Robert Louis Stevenson's Travels with a Donkey in the Cévennes.

Twenty years after the publication of his classic novel Ulverton, the acclaimed poet and novelist Adam Thorpe revisits the landscape which inspired him. Silbury Hill in Wiltshire has perplexed people for generations. Was it once an island, moated by water? Was it a place of worship and celebration, perhaps a vast measure of the passing seasons? Along with Stonehenge and Avebury, was it part of a healing landscape or a physical memory of the long-ago dead? Silbury Hill is the sum of all that we project. A blank screen where human dreams and nightmares flicker. The hill has been part of Adam Thorpe's own life since his schooldays at Marlborough, which he would often escape in the surrounding downlands. He has carried Silbury ever since, through his teenage years in Cameroon, into his adulthood in England and France: its presence fused to each landscape which became his home.On Silbury Hill is Adam Thorpe's own projection onto Silbury's grassy slopes. It is a chalkland memoir told in fragments and family snapshots,skilfully built, layer on layer, from Britain's ancient and modern past.

Emma Bovary is an avid reader of sentimental novels; brought up on a Normandy farm and convent-educated, she longs for the passion of romance. At first, Emma pins her hopes on marriage, but life with her well-meaning husband in the provinces leaves her bored and dissatisfied. She seeks escape through extravagant spending sprees and, eventually, adultery. As Emma pursues her impossible reverie she seals her own ruin and despair. Exquisite, moving, at times ferociously satirical and always psychologically acute, "Madame Bovary" remains one of the greatest, most beguiling novels ever written.
This stunning new translation, by the celebrated novelist Adam Thorpe, delicately and meticulously transposes the rhythms, tone and poetry of Madame Bovary and brings us closer to its shifting depths. It is destined to become the definitive English translation of our time.

Immerse yourself in the stories of Ulverton, as heard on BBC Radio 4 Book at Bedtime 'Sometimes you forget that it is a novel, and believe for a moment that you are really hearing the voice of the dead' Hilary Mantel At the heart of this novel lies the fictional village of Ulverton. It is the fixed point in a book that spans three hundred years. Different voices tell the story of Ulverton: one of Cromwell's soldiers staggers home to find his wife remarried and promptly disappears, an eighteenth century farmer carries on an affair with a maid under his wife's nose, a mother writes letters to her imprisoned son, a 1980s real estate company discover a soldier's skeleton, dated to the time of Cromwell... Told through diaries, sermons, letters, drunken pub conversations and film scripts, this is a masterful novel that reconstructs the unrecorded history of England. WITH AN INTRODUCTION FROM ROBERT MACFARLANE

On April 3, 1945, the advancing American army shells the historic town of Lohenfelde, and the Kaiser-Wilhelm museum. Within the museum's vaults, Heinrich Hoffer is hiding from the bombardment, and trying to keep a priceless Van Gogh from falling into the hands of a rogue Nazi. After the shelling, an American corporal, Neal Parry, finds a beautiful eighteenth-century oil painting in the rubble, and must confront both its beauty, and the morality of stealing it. The stories of Herr Hoffer, Parry, and their paintings unfold simultaneously in this gripping, brilliantly structured novel about art and war.

In his first collection of short stories, Adam Thorpe, acclaimed poet and novelist, explores the lives of his characters through the work th ey do: the jobs that empower or enslave, define or destroy them. Wheth er it is a dustman or a craftsman, on an English production line or de ep in the forests of Africa, work is seen as a means of social classif ication, an engine of prejudice or compassion or as an arena where bul lying and subservience have some kind of legitimacy. Do we choose the job or does the job choose us, Adam Thorpe asks: does the job become u s or do we become the job? Using the framework of occupation, its mund ane tedium, its strictures and releases, we are shown the unquenchable vitality of the human spirit: its continual capacity for a life beyon d. Told with vivid energy and a poet's delight in language, Shifts con firms Adam Thorpe as one of the most talented writers of his generatio n.

'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?

'She wanted to die, and she wanted to live in Paris.' This is the story of Emma, trapped in a disappointing marriage with a dull country doctor, she dreams for a life more like the sentimental novels she reads. In an attempt to break from the drab reality of her provincial life in Normandy, Emma takes a lover, and disaster soon follows. Greedy, delusional and selfish, the character of Emma Bovary scandalised readers from the novel's first publication in 1857, yet her magnetism is undeniable. A landmark work in modern realism, Madame Bovary vibrates with the inner life of a woman hungry for more. Meet ten of literature's most iconic heroines, jacketed in bold portraits by female photographers from around the world.

Mysterious disappearances, domestic cases, noiseless, bloodless snuffings-out... the law can look as deep as it likes, but when the crime itself goes unsuspected... oh yes, there's many a murderer basking in the sun... When Therese Raquin is forced to marry the sickly Camille, she sees a bare life stretching out before her, leading every evening to the same cold bed and every morning to the same empty day. Escape comes in the form of her husband's friend, Laurent, and Therese throws herself headlong into an affair. There seems only one obstacle to their happiness; Camille. They plot to be rid of him. But in destroying Camille they kill the very desire that connects them... First published in 1867, Therese Raquin has lost none of its power to enthral. Adam Thorpe's unflinching translation brings Zola's dark and shocking masterwork to life. A NEW TRANSLATION BY ADAM THORPE 'Adam Thorpe's version deserves to become the standard English text' Daily Telegraph

A new translation by Adam Thorpe
Gustave Flaubert once said of his heroine, "Emma Bovary, c'est moi." In this acclaimed new translation, Adam Thorpe brings readers closer than ever before to Flaubert's peerless text and, by extension, the author himself.
Emma, a passionate dreamer raised in the French countryside, is ready for her life to take off when she marries the decent, dull Dr. Charles Bovary. Marriage, however, fails to live up to her expectations, which are fueled by sentimental novels, and she turns disastrously to love affairs. The story of Emma's adultery scandalized France when "Madame Bovary" was first published. Today, the heartbreaking story of Emma's financial ruin remains just as compelling. Translator Adam Thorpe, an accomplished author in his own right, pays careful attention to the "complex music" of Flaubert's language, with its elegant, finely wrought sentences and closely observed detail. This exquisite Modern Library edition is sure to set a new standard for an enduring classic.
Praise for Adam Thorpe's translation of "Madame Bovary"
"What leaves me reeling with each rereading (and Adam Thorpe's new translation is, pardon the pun, to die for) is the use of language. There can be no doubt as to the reason for Flaubert's brain popping at the top of the stairs when he was fifty-eight. He broke it scouring for perfect sentences, words, le mot juste."--Russell Kane, "The Independent"
"Flaubert described his great work as a poem, so it is fitting that a poet and novelist of Thorpe's stature should turn his hand to it."--Robin Robertson, "The Herald" (Scotland)