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 Cromwells soldiers staggers home to find his wife remarried & promptly disappears an eighteenth century farmer carries on an affair with a maid under his wifes nose a mother writes letters to her imprisoned son a 1980s real estate company discover a soldiers skeleton dated to the time of Cromell... Told through diaries sermons letters drunken pub conversations & film scripts this is a masterful novel that reconstructs the unrecorded history of Engl&. Sometimes you forget that it is a novel & believe for a moment that you are really hearing the voice of the dead". (Hilary Mantel)."