Reading Adam Thorpe is always a risk because you'll either get complete genius or you'll get stream of consciousness that needs an editor. I don't mean to sound cruel or brutal but Missing Fay doesn't really seem to do anything or go anywhere. Thank you for approving the title, I'm sorry I didn't enjoy it.

Missing Fay is not a crime novel as it might originally appear. Instead it is a collection of stories of people connected, however tangentially, to Fay. It is a portrait of a fractured Britain, with Brexit hovering in the background.

A novel of interlinked narratives, centred on (or linked obliquely to), the Fay of the title. It is a well written novel of our times, set in the Brexity heartland of Lincolnshire.

Told in a series of linked narratives, the book explores a small community in Lincolnshire and how the lives of a disparate group of characters are touched, however tangentially, by the disappearance of 14-year-old Fay. Each one of these characters come alive on the page and I really felt that if I were to walk down the street, especially the one where many of them have small businesses, somehow I would know them instantly, and if I were to visit the run-down Ermine estate where Fay lives I would recognise her too, such is the skill with which Thorpe delineates them. His descriptions of the landscape are equally vivid, evocative descriptions which make the landscape come alive just as the people do. Fay herself is a particularly nuanced and complex character, but all of the people around her have distinctive and convincing voices, and are drawn with great subtlety. The novel is more a series of vignettes than a sustained narrative and I found this approach rewarding. Much is left to the reader’s perception and understanding. Nothing is resolved, nothing is explained, it’s just a slice of life at a particular time and in a particular place. There’s some very fine writing here indeed and I found the book absorbing, engaging and thoroughly enjoyable.

Very enjoyable book the description of the places and people are very true to life. Very compulsive reading.

This novel is a character study largely drawn on loneliness, dissatisfaction and alienation. It is set in a rural town in Lincolnshire where a young girl has gone missing. Inter-connected characters interact in various ways prior to the girl disappearing. The novel successfully captures the 'quiet desperation' described by Thoreau. ,

This is a carefully and very cleverly crafted novel with a rich and multilayered storyline. It reads as a series of interlinked short stories (reminiscent of Elizabeth Strout’s ‘Olive Kettridge’) where the characters (the characters names are the chapter titles) circle, interweave, pepper and add layer and angles to every day life in 2012 Lincolnshire.

Within the novel there are short inserts from Fay’s own point of view which reveal aspects about her life around the time she went missing. But more importantly there are the points of view of people who knew her and people who knew of her through the missing posters; a father struggling with family life while on holiday, a middle aged woman who is in love with a man she can’t seem to declare her feelings to, an alcoholic second-hand bookseller sealed off in his own private world (like the story enclosed within the book covers), an elderly man who is nostalgic for his past, a Rumanian nurse racked by homesickness and a businessman turned monk (my favourite chapter). Each of these voices are struggling, people on the brink of change (or sanity) or turning point of their lives (relating to Fay’s own dramatic turning point from being present to disappearing).

The chapters could read as separate pieces of work they are so skilfully and brilliantly put together. However, Thorpe adds colour and consistency to the work as these characters and their lives touch/nudge up lightly upon each other and we witness how some of them view one another, as well as how they interact and react to one another.

Thorpe’s storytelling is absorbing and full of wonderful detail. This is a masterpiece on empathy and it keeps the reader engrossed as we try to fit the pieces together (and keep an eye out for the overlapping stories). It is an extremely visual novel but Adam Thorpe really excels in voice (and his dialogue is perfect – if present. Fittingly there is little dialogue in the monk’s chapter). Each chapter has a distinct voice, pitch, tone, pace, sound, experience and power. This is close to genius.

In ‘Missing Fay’ Adam Thorpe has managed to display the complexity of human nature and the depth of personality with each of his characters (even secondary characters that do not have a chapter of their own but flit amongst the other characters’ lives are bought powerfully into life). This is a truly remarkable book worth rereading again and again to really enjoy and pick out all the delicious details Thorpe has scattered amongst the stories.

Having enjoyed Thorpe's debut 'Ulverton' I hadn't picked up any of his books since so was interested to see how he has developed as a writer. On the surface this is a simple book about a girl who has gone missing from a council estate but in the hands of Thorpe it is so much more. By looking at how the disappearance of Fay touches the lives of several other people, albeit tangentially in many cases, Thorpe has actually created a book which encapsulates life in Britain today. It sounds like it should be a crime thriller and instead is an adult and interesting novel.

Missing Fay is not so much a novel as a collection of six pen portraits of different people in and around Lincoln. These portraits inter-relate, and they are interleaved and intertwined with the story of a missing teenager whose face features on faded posters in cafes and shops, but this is not a novel with a unifying narrative. The strands don't all come together at the end.

So the success of the text hinges on the characters. All are well drawn and quite distinctive. They speak in different voices and think different thoughts. And they are all quite unlovely. Whether it is David, the father from Hell (actually from New Zealand) whose mission is to shield his family from capitalist waste; or Mike, the bookshop owner who dislikes people, haunted by a moving book; or Chris the seriously creepy postulant monk... They are all engaging, yet somehow also not engaging. When they have a story to tell - when they are doing stuff - they are interesting enough. But they do have a tendency to meander off into winer monologue that can be distancing and even a little wearisome.

And then there is Fay. Whereas most missing teenagers are little innocent angels, victims of the cruel world, Fay is at least the co-producer of her misfortune. Sure, she comes from the rough end of town and her stepfather is not exactly nurturing, but Fay seems to have chosen the life of a light-fingered truant all by herself. She speaks her slight thoughts in a convincing but difficult local dialect - although she has little to say and seems to operate more on instinct than thought.

This adds up to an intriguing work where the pieces of the puzzle are more interesting than the puzzle itself. It is well worth reading, even if it does feel somewhat arbitrary to be following the particular characters we find in its pages.