Ulverton

At the heart of this extraordinary novel lies the fictional village of Ulverton on the Wessex Downs of England: the fixed point in the book's 300-year cycle of history, both its backdrop and its central character. A dozen accounts, narrated by a dozen different voices, tell the story of Ulverton through the generations: a soldier in Cromwell's army returns to find his wife remarried, and promptly vanishes; an eighteenth-century farmer introduces scientific planting methods and carries on an affair with a maid under his wife's nose; during a 1980s TV documentary, real estate developers discover a soldier's skeleton, dated to the time of Cromwell.