Ulverton by Adam Thorpe

I really think the words 'postmodern novel' are completely inappropriate to certain works, and this is definitely one of them. This is not a 'novel', this is a puzzle in book form. We just don't yet have a name for the form of writing this is. Also, this would definitely go in my 'Too Much' category of postmodern novels. It's the story of various events in a small English town and is basically a tour through time of rural England from the seventeenth century to the present day (1980s). It is told through a variety of mediums; letters, diaries, even a screenplay. It's a puzzle because you have to keep track of events that happened in the previous sections and see how they reappear, change, and affect subsequent ones. It might be, as this book cover so authoritatively and vaguely insists, 'a masterpiece', in fact I do think it's very good, it's just not my thing at all. Highly recommended if you are interested in different sorts of manure used in the eighteenth century, like reading dialects that will make the Yorkshire dialect in Wuthering Heights look like the pinnacle of grammatical correctness, or just really fancy giving yourself a headache. Just make sure you don't mistake this for a novel.