Missing Fay

Description

A mysterious haunting novel starring a cast of brilliant eccentrics bound together by a missing girl 'An intricately crafted novel, sharp-eared, current and full of heart' Guardian, Books of the YearA 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?

Adam Thorpe was born in Paris in 1956. His first novel, Ulverton, appeared in 1992, and he has published two books of stories, six poetry collections, and nine further novels, most recently Flight (2012).www.adamthorpe.net

Twenty-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 *