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Once 'England's most promising young composer' - now living comfortably in Hampstead with his wife Milly, an heiress - Jack Middleton is in mid-life decline, his career in free-fall. When he visits Estonia for a three-week search for inspiration, he falls for a young waitress called Kaja, deeply bound up in the suffering of her country and the joy and danger of its new freedom. They embark on a passionate affair on a lonely island in a time warp. Then it's over. But of course nothing is ever over. Still childless six years later, Jack and Milly's marriage shows the strain, but they battle on better than most - until the past returns with a vengeance. The crisis takes place over a month, against a precise calendar of background events, both minor and major. Set in London and Estonia between 1999 and 2005 in the aftermath of the London bombings, as a hot, despondent summer drags on unnaturally into the autumn, Between Each Breath is a rich and often hilarious critique of Blair's Britain: decadent, bewildered, shallow, greedy, but knowing all the right buttons to press; knowing the language of compassion and abusing it. A story of love and betrayal, of age and youth, of wealth and poverty, of the new Europe and the old Europe, of art and compromise, of youthful ideals and cynical weariness, Adam Thorpe's extraordinary new novel is a biting, timely satire and a powerfully moving examination of social and emotional disintegration.

A collection of poems concerned with the connection of the felt past with the lived present. The author uncovers fragments of the past with the care of an archaeologist.

An expectant first-time novelist meets the publisher, who has asked him to lunch, only to find himself drawn, unwittingly and inexorably, into a terrible personal tragedy. Rob an orchestral tympanist, sees his life crumble over the half-time coffee and sandwiches. A business executive is called in the middle of an important conference in Scotland with the news that his wife has given birth prematurely; his inability to cope with the resulting divided loyalties, and the way he deals with his own passive indecisiveness, reveals the terrifying emotional vacuum in his life.

No Telling, Adam Thorpe's fifth novel, is set in 1968 in the Parisian suburbs and narrated by twelve-year-old Gilles as he approaches his First Communion, puberty, and some sense of the chaos around him. His home is deeply dysfunctional: a dithering mother, a hard-drinking, womanising uncle who becomes his stepfather, and an older sister, Carole - an unbalanced revolutionary who hasn't danced her ballet steps since the death of their real father in 1960. Gilles is blithely unaware that any of this is out of the ordinary, as he and his friend Christophe try and piece together a world from fragments of rumour and hushed adult conversation. There is a deeper trauma here, however, far more shocking than anything Gilles could have dreamt of - a mystery it will take the events of the novel and eight years to resolve. Set against a backdrop of a turbulent France - as it lurches from rural piety, and a hundred years of terrible history, to a hurried modernity - Adam Thorpe has written a tour-de-force of compassion, humour and storytelling brilliance, seen through the eyes of an adolescent boy.

In his first collection of short stories, poet and novelist Thorpe explores the lives of his characters through the work that they do. The first-person confessionals include a Ghanaian immigrant with an identity crisis; a bin-man uncovering spooky filth; and a death caused by Verlaine's cigar butt.

A dozen accounts, narrated by a dozen different voices, tell the story of Ulverton, a fictional village on the Wessex Downs, through its generations. Based on a bedrock of folktales, myth and oral tradition, the author builds layers of new narrative, often using dialect or the true demotic voice.