Reservoir 13

by Jon McGregor

Overview

A New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice
Longlisted for the Man Booker Prize

A “fiercely intelligent . . . daring, and very moving” about an English village haunted by one family’s loss—for readers of The Virgin Suicides and Zadie Smith’s NW (George Saunders, The Paris Review Daily).

Midwinter in an English village. A teenage girl has gone missing. Everyone is called upon to join the search. The villagers fan out across the moors as the police set up roadblocks and a crowd of news reporters descends on what is usually a place of peace. Meanwhile, there is work that must still be done: cows milked, fences repaired, stone cut, pints poured, beds made, sermons written, a pantomime rehearsed.

As the seasons unfold and the search for the missing girl goes on, there are those who leave the village and those who are pulled back; those who come together and those who break apart. There are births and deaths; secrets kept and exposed; livelihoods made and lost; small kindnesses and unanticipated betrayals. An extraordinary novel of cumulative power and grace, Reservoir 13 explores the rhythms of the natural world and the repeated human gift for violence, unfolding over thirteen years as the aftershocks of a tragedy refuse to subside.

“Jon McGregor has revolutionized that most hallowed of mystery plots: the one where some foul deed takes place in a tranquil English village that . . . doesn’t feel so tranquil anymore.” —The Wall Street Journal

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781936787715
Publisher:	Catapult
Publication date:	10/03/2017
Sold by:	Penguin Random House Publisher Services
Format:	eBook
Pages:	304
Sales rank:	565,556
File size:	1 MB

About the Author

Jon McGregor is the author of four novels and two story collections. He is the winner of the IMPAC Dublin Literature Prize, the Costa Novel Award, the Betty Trask Prize, the Somerset Maugham Award, and the American Academy of Arts and Letters E.M Forster Award, and has been long–listed three times for the Man Booker Prize, most recently in 2017 for Reservoir 13. He is Professor of Creative Writing at the University of Nottingham, England, where he edits The Letters Page, a literary journal in letters.

Read an Excerpt

They gathered at the car park in the hour before dawn and waited to be told what to do. It was cold and there was little conversation. There were questions that weren't being asked. The missing girl's name was Rebecca Shaw. When last seen she'd been wearing a white hooded top. A mist hung low across the moor and the ground was frozen hard. They were given instructions and then they moved off, their boots crunching on the stiff ened ground and their tracks fading behind them as the heather sprang back into shape. She was five feet tall, with dark-blonde hair. She had been missing for hours. They kept their eyes down and they didn't speak and they wondered what they might fi nd. The only sounds were footsteps and dogs barking along the road and faintly a helicopter from the reservoirs. The helicopter had been out all night and found nothing, its searchlight skimming across the heather and surging brown streams. Jackson's sheep had taken the fear and scattered through a broken gate, and he'd been up all hours bringing them back. The mountain-rescue teams and the cave teams and the police had found nothing, and at midnight a search had been called. It hadn't taken much to raise the volunteers. Half the village was out already, talking about what could have happened.

Interviews

Jon McGregor and Maile Meloy in Conversation

Jon McGregor's astonishing new Booker-longlisted novel, Reservoir 13, begins with a search for a thirteen-year-old girl who disappears while walking in the English Peak District. The people in the nearest village help with the search, and their lives are altered by her disappearance -- they're haunted by the presence of the distraught parents, by half-formed theories and suspicions, by secret teenage knowledge, and by recurring public scrutiny.

That the life of the village necessarily goes on, in the wake of an unimaginable private catastrophe, is the great subject of the novel. Love blooms and fails, seasons change, revenge is exacted, animals give birth and hunt and die. I've never seen the passage of time more intricately imagined, and the effect is profound and moving.

Reservoir 13 is a wonder, and expanded my ideas about what fiction can do. I finished it in simple awe -- and then found I had a lot of questions about how it was done. -- Maile Meloy Maile Meloy: The reservoirs beyond the Derbyshire village where the girl vanishes are an attraction for walkers and a water source, but they're also an ominous presence: all that water, hiding things, hiding a whole earlier village. I've just learned that there's a genre called Reservoir Noir -- crime fiction about drowned towns, as a niche in environmental fiction. Do you feel like a part of that tradition (now that you know it exists)? Why do you think people are drawn to write about reservoirs?

Jon McGregor: Well, that really is a niche within a niche. I had no idea there was such a tradition! Certainly, in the UK it does feel as though reservoirs generate an ambivalent creepy/beautiful response from a lot of people. They have become apparently natural features, nestled in the landscape, and yet people know that 100 years ago there were villages and communities living down there. During drought season, crowds will gather to watch the churches and barns resurface beneath the water. It's all just a bit creepy. And yet at the same time, the reservoirs are a crucial part of our national infrastructure and classic pieces of engineering. And those are the sorts of things I'm drawn to write about: things where you can say, "Well, it's this, but it's also this." In this book in particular, the reservoirs are also a good example of the way in which an apparently pastoral landscape is actually heavily industrialized.

One thing I didn't think through: it turns out that I'm not all that great at pronouncing "reservoir," which has made author events hard work.

MM: Wait, now I need to know how you pronounce it.

JM: Well, it's more that I stumble over it. It comes out a little bit "wesevwoir," but also I kind of swallow the whole word. I've started using it as a vocal warm-up and really stretching my lips around the word. That seems to help.

MM: The missing girl, Becky, is really the only character who's physically described. And she has to be described, because they're searching for her. Sometimes you get a sense about someone's size or physical presence, but that's it. Obviously that's a very deliberate choice. Do your editors ever ask you for descriptions? (I'm asking because mine do, but I think I lead them to expect it.)

JM: I don't know how deliberate a choice it was, really . . . I think I've just never had the instinct to describe a character physically in any detail. I tend to find my way into a character by thinking about the way they speak, the way they move through a space, the clothes they wear, the choices they make. Hair color and nose shape and jawline always seem less interesting to me. Although I have to say, there's probably more physical description in this book than in any of my previous books. (For the record, my editors have never asked for physical descriptions. They're too busy fixing other clunkers.)

And actually, here's the thing: the whole point of the detailed description of Becky is that it's a formulaic police description, and that the repetition of it actually renders her less visible and less real. Something I had in mind while writing this book was the way in which when someone disappears in a newsworthy way like this, they quickly become fixed in the public mind -- a single photograph, a single description, the knowledge of where they were last seen. And the way the lack of complexity must be another loss for the family to cope with.

MM: You're a master of the collective narrative. This novel is passed among characters and animals and bodies of water, within paragraphs. Did you start with primary characters and then work out from there? Did you have this whole village in your head? How did it begin?

JM: How did it begin? I . . . don't really know. Wait, I do know. It started with a short story I wrote about the day when a search party goes up on the hill to look for Becky, in which there was very little of Becky and plenty of the lives of half a dozen of the characters involved in the search. Those were my core group of characters initially, and the story had already given me a sense of the landscape and the layout of the village; and I knew that I wanted to explore that world a lot more fully. There was just a natural opening-out process, from each of those original characters. Who are the brothers and sisters? Who are the partners or the ex-partners? Where are the children? And then beyond that: where does this character live? What's in her garden? Where does she work? What does that involve? If there's a blackbird in the garden, where does it nest, and when does it lay eggs, and when do those chicks leave the nest? If a fox catches the blackbird, where does it get eaten? Does it get taken back to the cubs? And when were they born? And if the fox den is in the woodland, what kind of trees are growing there, and how old are they?

I could go on.

It was just a kind of endless pursuit of curiosity, constantly asking these questions to try and expand my sense of the world, make it bigger and more detailed. By the time I was done with that pursuit of curiosity, I had hundreds of characters, if you count the animals and birds and trees and bodies of water as characters. Which I think I do.

MM: I love that you don't feel you need to provide a kind of internal glossary about that incredibly detailed world, when specific terms and customs come up -- you let the reader figure things out. There's a woman who thinks, "How could you live in a well-dressing town and not know these things?" But it isn't until very late in the book that it's clear what well dressing is. We're expected to know, too, or to learn, or to Google, and eventually we do. Can you talk about terms, and that kind of specific local knowledge?

JM: Well, I'm going to be a bit chippy here and say that my experience as a reader of American fiction has often been that of the baffled outsider who doesn't understand all the terms and is expected to catch up fast. It was years before I knew what wainscoting was, for example, or bangs. I never really understood where a stoop was, or what the various horse-drawn vehicles in William Maxwell's novels were. But it didn't actually matter. It felt authentic, and it felt like something I could discover later on, and I would never have wanted an explanation from the writer to interrupt the story.

So that was my instinct with this book. I understood that, even in the UK, many readers wouldn't understand well dressing (I barely understand it myself, to be honest), or the finer details of sheep farming, or some of the more technical reservoir-maintenance vocabulary. But my basic rule is that if the people in the book understand these things, why would they go to the trouble of explaining them to the reader? I hope that by the end of the book most of it is more or less clear, just by simple accumulation of detail, but I also want these things to function as details of a landscape -- a world -- in which the reader is only a visiting guest.

MM: The book is so beautiful, and such a fully realized world, that I kept wondering, "How did you do that?" The human characters each have stories that play out over seasons and years, but so do the badgers, foxes, buzzards, springtails, and sheep. I know you did a lot of research. Did you have a chart? Did you have seasons laid out? Did you have a fox narrative, and then break it up and figure out where to put it in? Or did you write each paragraph as it is?

JM: Oh, well now. There's a short answer to this question, and a very long one. The short answer is that I wrote each narrative line separately, and that each narrative line followed either an arc or a cycle. So the human characters mostly had stories that, as you say, played out over several years (although some of those are stuck in repetitions and loops of a kind; poor old Geoff Simmons endlessly walking his slow whippet, for example). And the blackbirds had an annual lifecycle narrative of nesting, hatching, fledging, fattening. There were also working routines, across a day (milking the cows) or across a year (making the hay), as well as cycles of weather, season, water levels, and plenty more besides. Once I'd written all of that, all I had to do was put them in the right order.

(And that "right order" had something to do with an idea of accumulation as a narrative technique, of the relentless and measured passing of time, of life coming at you fast and from all directions. I liked the idea of using the non sequitur as a device, and working that pretty hard.)

Sorry, that was supposed to be the short version of the answer. Don't let me get started on the long version. It involves ring binders, scissors and Sellotape, and a lot of floor space.

MM: Just reading that makes my head hurt. Although maybe the ring binders and scissors are important for a book that's so much about process and physical work.

JM: Well, in the end I didn't really have enough floor space for the physical cut-and-paste operation I had planned, and I ended up on these extended mental juggling sequences, trying to hold a whole series of decisions in my head while I frantically found the text and dragged it to the right spot. It was like those scenes in movies about socially awkward mathematics geniuses, where our hero solves a fiendish formula by scribbling all over a series of paper napkins. Only without the musical montage. Or the mathematics genius.

MM: Can we tell people that "Reservoir 13" is not a clue? Do you want to talk about the title? And does the number 13 really show up in your life all the time, as it does in your Instagram account?

JM: Oh boy . . . "Reservoir" 13 is really not supposed to be a clue. There are no clues in this book, although there are plenty of possibilities and a lot of speculation. It's been interesting to me, having set out to write a book in which there would be little in the way of resolution, how many clues readers say they have found. Readers have been trained to find resolution, I think; trained to see a book as a puzzle to be solved. I have a lot of time for that kind of reading experience, and admiration for the writers who do that work; but I'd like there to be space for the lack of resolution and the lack of closure which life so often offers us.

The title was a kind of placeholder title for a long time -- ah, this is the project with all the reservoirs, and all the instances of the number thirteen -- and then eventually I just became very fond of it. I like the way it alludes to a kind of 1970s abstract art title, or a Richard Brautigan−era tiny literary magazine. It has no real meaning, but readers are looking for one.

And yes, ever since I started this project, the number 13 has been remarkably prevalent. My marriage ended after 13 years. I moved into an apartment numbered 13. My membership number at the local subscription library is 13. I book a train ticket and land in carriage number 13. I end up on the Booker Prize longlist, and there are 13 books; they announce the shortlist on the 13th of the month. What does it all mean? It means nothing.

MM: We met at a writers' retreat where I got nothing done and you wrote every day, and I was very envious, and then I was shamefully pleased when you told me you'd thrown what you'd done there away. How much do you throw away, in relation to what makes it into a book?

JM: You realize this was 13 years ago? Thirteen years ago?

I was so young and anxious then. I remember we were in Italy, in a beautiful house in the Tuscan hills, and there should have been long, lazy days of walking and drinking fine wine and finding little family restaurants, but I was desperate to hide in my room and write in some very puritan way. Like, this is called a writing retreat, so if I don't write the whole time I am a fraud.

I wrote a lot of rubbish that month. I'm sure you had a much nicer time. Writers' retreats are a funny thing, aren't they?

It's hard to say how much I throw away. It's not like I get to the end and have whole abandoned chapters. But I'm pretty fussy at the point when I'm putting sentences together. Things are crossed out and rewritten often in the early stages. And then I get to the point where most paragraphs are improved by lopping off the beginning and the end. But a lot of the time it's not so much throwing something away as constantly reworking it. Do you want a percentage? Thirteen. I throw away 13 percent of the text that goes toward a finished book.

MM: That's a really good retention rate -- 87 percent stays in?

JM: Oh, I should make myself sound more heroic or puritan or something. Okay: I keep 13 percent of the text, and the rest gets thrown away.

MM: How do your Reservoir Tapes for BBC Radio 4 relate to the novel?

JM: Well, I'm glad you asked. They're a set of 15 short stories (each 15 minutes long; I asked if I could 13 stories at 13 minutes each, and they wouldn't have it), which are all set in the same village as Reservoir 13, in the weeks and months before the girl goes missing. I have no shame in calling it a prequel. It's been a real challenge -- and a prverse kind of fun -- to retune my writing ear to the radio. There's a perilous sense that a listener could turn the radio off at any second, and so each line has to give them a reason to keep listening; and each line has to follow a clear narrative, because the listener has no chance to glance back up the page, or slow down. There needs to be more space in the text, and less density.

The stories could be read as a kind of prelude to the novel; or they could be read afterwards to fill in some gaps; or they could be read completely separately. I tried to keep those options open. They're available as a podcast from the BBC now, and Catapult Books will be publishing them late next year.

--November 15, 2017

Editorial Reviews

Set in our own day in a village in England's Peak District, Jon McGregor's Reservoir 13 opens with searchers assembling to look for thirteen-year-old Rebecca Shaw, last seen out on a walk in the countryside with her parents, who had somehow lost sight of her. It is year's end, and the family has been spending the holiday in the village, a place surrounded by hills and moors, marshy areas, watery ravines, caves, abandoned lead mines, quarries, and reservoirs -- all possible sites of misadventure. And, of course, there is always the thought of abduction and foul play. Rebecca has been gone for hours, then days. Divers are called in to search the river and reservoirs. The media descends with all its paraphernalia and presumption.

At this point it is only right to say that if you are expecting a missing-girl thriller: don't. This extraordinary novel is a different and much greater affair. As the pages turn into weeks and months and years, our attention -- along with that of the villagers themselves -- never drifts entirely from the girl and her possible fate; but the everyday goings-on around the place, of the people and, equally, of the creatures of nature, come increasingly into focus and begin to take over. Blackbirds, swallows, butterflies, foxes, badgers, and other beasts, birds, bugs, and even vegetation, are shown following their annual cycles regardless of human drama.

The villagers eventually return to their own traditional round of activities: the New Year's celebration, the Spring Dance, "well- dressing," Mischief Night, Bonfire Night, sheep tupping, lambing, and so on. But at the same time, the village is following a larger, by-now familiar course: It is dissolving under the corporate rationale of late capitalism. The new owners of the adjacent great estate do not hold themselves responsible for the upkeep of public amenities as the original owners had and have hired lawyers to prove it. The butcher shop cannot compete with the new supermarket, and the owner loses the business, along with the knives that were his father's before him. His wife leaves him, and he is reduced to working at the supermarket's meat counter. ("They gave him a striped apron and a badge saying "Master Butcher," but it wasn't butchery. The meat came in ready-jointed, and he was just there to hand it over.") The dairyman is increasingly pressed and depressed by the low price of milk. The village youths grow up to find there are no jobs.

The novel unspools, becoming a mural in time depicting the changing lives of these people over a dozen or so years, but the continuing question of Rebecca's fate gives the progression a dark tincture. Events are reported in a detached, almost hypnotic manner, the story becoming an intoxicating distillate of gossip. The adolescents who had known Rebecca form and reform into couples; they grow up, go away, come back. The girl's parents stay on, the father roaming the countryside, ever searching; the marriage breaks up. Protesters come from afar to block the blasting out of another quarry. They set up an encampment that flourishes, fades, disappears. The village Don Juan discovers he has lost his irresistible appeal; his brother breaks off his affair with a young schoolteacher and marries the mother of his son; they have another child and eventually separate again; the school caretaker is charged with downloading child pornography. The divers show up year after year, reviving the memory of the search for the girl's body in the river and reservoirs, though now they are unclogging spillways and making routine checks of the dams for structural deterioration.

Unadorned and tightly controlled, the style possesses plain-spun eloquence, and for all its bland affect and austerity it conveys a lived feeling of the rhythm of things in the village. Here, for instance, is what happens when there is blasting at the quarry:

When the first siren sounded over at the quarry the workers cleared the area. When the second siren sounded the birds fell silent. In the village, windows and doors were pulled shut. The third siren sounded, and the birds rose in the air, and the explosion came from deep behind the working face, spreading through the body of the earth, a low crumping shudder that shrugged huge slabs of limestone to the quarry floor. The dust rose and continued rising and drifted out through the air for five minutes or more. The first all-clear sounded, and the birds returned noisily to the treetops. The second all-clear sounded, and the workers returned to their places. In the village, the windows and doors were kept closed as the dust spread. On the bus back from town Winnie saw Irene and asked whether she'd had her hair done. Irene's hand went up to her head, although she hadn't meant it to. She told Winnie it was only the usual.

This style gives plenty of scope for the sort of inadvertent, deadpan humor that is the special province of police logs and committee- meeting minutes. ("Miss Dale asked Ms. French if her mother was any better, and Ms. French outlined the ways in which she wasn't.") In fact, despite the novel's grim start, it is leavened throughout by wry humor. ("In an attempt to meet the county council's target for budget cutting, the parish council agreed to the street lighting being turned off between midnight and five, not without much discussion, during which Miriam Pearson was advised that the expression black hole of Calcutta was no longer acceptable.")

I have never read a book quite like this, a novel whose stark, declaratory sentences are so vital, whose overall plotlessness is so completely absorbing, and in which the universes of nature's creatures and human beings are so powerfully presented as inhabiting the same world, though running along parallel courses, oblivious to the other's concerns. McGregor's previous novel won the IMPAC Dublin Literary Award and I truly hope this one achieves a similar honor.

Katherine A. Powers reviews books widely and has been a finalist for the Nona Balakian Citation for Excellence in Reviewing from the National Book Critics Circle. She is the editor of Suitable Accommodations: An Autobiographical Story of Family Life: The Letters of J. F. Powers, 1942–1963.

Reviewer: Katherine A. Powers

The Barnes & Noble Review

McGregor is a beautiful, controlled writer, who can convey the pathos of a life in a few lines. Despite the large cast of characters, each feels specific and real…[Reservoir 13 is] unconventional but affecting…

The New York Times Book Review - Kate Taylor

★ 08/21/2017
McGregor’s unforgettable novel begins with a 13-year-old girl’s disappearance from an English village, and then tracks the village through the following years, as teenagers become adults, babies are born, people grow old and die, and couples get together and separate while what happened to the girl remains a mystery. Rebecca Shaw and her parents are visiting the village over Christmas, staying at the barn conversion they rented the previous summer, when Rebecca vanishes during a walk on the moors. Residents, police, and mountain and cave rescue teams search but find nothing. As time passes, the case stays open and unsolved. Local teenagers who knew Becky better than they admit to parents or police share memories of her among themselves while having sex, drinking alcohol, doing drugs, and growing up; the school custodian is arrested on child pornography charges; a successful man returns to the village temporarily; an unhappy wife leaves permanently; the vicar collects confidences; one day the potter smashes his pottery. Twins born early in the novel grow up to hear the story of the missing girl, now part of a village culture marked by dark undercurrents and occasional moments of light. McGregor portrays individuals and the community as a whole, across seasons, in mundane scenes and moments of heartbreak, cruelty, and guilt. Close-ups of flora and fauna are set against a landscape of reservoirs, dens, and caves, the village hall, the pub, and the flooded quarry. This is an ambitious tour de force that demands the reader’s attention; those willing to follow along will be rewarded with a singular and haunting story. (Oct.)

Publishers Weekly

PRAISE FOR RESERVOIR 13

A New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice
Winner of the Costa Novel Award
Longlisted for the Man Booker Prize 2017
Shortlisted for the Goldsmiths Prize 2017
Named a Best Book of the Year by Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kirkus Reviews, & the Los Angeles Review

“McGregor's book achieves a visionary power . . . he has written a novel with a quiet but insistently demanding, even experimental form. The word 'collage' implies something static and finally fixed, but the beauty of Reservoir 13 is in fact rhythmic, musical, ceaselessly contrapuntal . . . A remarkable achievement [and a] subtle unravelling of what we think of as the conventional project of the novel.”
—James Wood, The New Yorker

“McGregor is a beautiful, controlled writer, who can convey the pathos of a life in a few lines. Despite the large cast of characters, each feels specific and real. . . . [An] unconventional but affecting novel.”
—The New York Times Book Review

“Jon McGregor has revolutionized that most hallowed of mystery plots: the one where some foul deed takes place in a tranquil English village that, by the close of the case, doesn’t feel so tranquil anymore. . . . McGregor’s writing style is ingenious.”
—Maureen Corrigan, The Washington Post

“Disturbing, one–of–a–kind . . . Most books involving crime and foul play provide the consolation of some sort of resolution. But Mr. McGregor's novel, which was long–listed for this year's Man Booker Prize, shows how life, however unsettlingly, continues in the absence of such explanation.”
—Tom Nolan, The Wall Street Journal

“An intricate and absorbing mosaic–like structure of miniature stories, scenes and snapshots. . . . While Reservoir 13 starts out with the familiar hallmarks of a crime novel, it quickly develops into a quite different literary beast, one that acquires power and depth through bold form and style, not gripping drama and suspense . . . This is unconventional storytelling, a daring way to tell a tale, but one that yields haunting and stimulating results.”
—Star Tribune (Minneapolis)

“Fiercely intelligent . . . [An] astonishing new novel . . . strange, daring, and very moving . . . The book is a rare and dazzling feat of art that also (in my reading of it) outs us, in a gentle way, for a certain gratuitous drama–seeking tendency we all tend to have as readers—a tendency that makes it harder to see the very real, consequential, beautiful, and human–scaled dramas occurring all around is in real life, in every moment (in nature, in human affairs).”
—George Saunders, The Paris Review Daily

More Praise for Jon McGregor
“Jon McGregor is a writer who will make a significant stamp on world literature. In fact, he already has.”
—Colum McCann

“Jon McGregor writes with frightening intelligence and impeccable technique. Every page is a revelation.”
—Teju Cole

“Jon McGregor’s stories are full of unremarkable landscape, destabilizing drama, and people— pinned in place by themselves. But they gleam with endearing detail. His writing is unnerving, unconventional and lovely.”
—Leanne Shapton

“These stories are illuminated by Jon McGregor’s fearless and humane imagination. Both tragic and comic, they form a polyphonic portrait of a people and a place. Exhilarating.”
—Katie Kitamura

“Jon McGregor's uncanny stories linger long after you have finished them. He quietly inserts distinct, convincing voices into vivid and compelling landscapes.”
―Dana Spiotta

From the Publisher

★ 09/01/2017
While on a winter vacation with her parents in a northern England village, a 13-year-old girl goes for a walk on the moors alone and disappears. This event, plus the intrusive police investigation and fruitless search of the area's multiple reservoirs and surrounding territory, shock the townspeople, lending the story its tense tone. But the presumed crime remains unsolved, and though the teen is not forgotten, life goes on. As the novel unfolds, an unrelenting accretion of declarative sentences describe the village residents, their local traditions, the weather, the seasons, and even the wildlife, the narrative deftly getting us inside the lives of the many characters, allowing us to understand their isolation and interdependence. Years slowly pass within the tale yet go all too quickly—as in real life. McGregor's (This Isn't the Sort of Thing That Happens to Someone Like You) writing is extraordinary, and while the narrative technique is initially wearing in the way village life can be—the monotony, the knowledge of everybody's business—it coheres remarkably into a knowable, comforting, ultimately compelling world. VERDICT This treatise on timelessness and human nature was recently long-listed for the Man Booker Prize. Highly recommended.—Reba Leiding, emeritus, James Madison Univ. Lib., Harrisonburg, VA

Library Journal

A young girl disappears in the north of England while on holiday with her parents and is never found. This sober examination of long-lasting grief and village life is presented in somber tones by Matt Bates. He's an excellent choice of narrator for an audiobook that explores the minutiae of how people return to daily life after a tragedy has struck. Prospective listeners will want to be aware that this is a novel focusing on the inner lives of its characters, not a mystery or police procedural. Listeners will hear a tightly controlled, low-voiced portrayal of inexplicable loss. Fans of literary fiction delivered in the style of radio theater will enjoy the experience. M.R. © AudioFile 2017, Portland, Maine

DECEMBER 2017 - AudioFile

★ 2017-09-19
A young girl disappears outside a small village in northern England.With just four books, McGregor (This Isn't the Sort of Thing That Happens to Someone Like You, 2012, etc.) has already made a substantial impact on the literary scene; three of his novels, including this one, have been longlisted for the Man Booker Prize, and he won the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award for Even the Dogs (2010). His latest, an atmospheric, meticulously crafted novel, begins like a mystery then quickly morphs into something altogether different. A family is visiting an English village for the New Year, and their 13-year-old daughter, Rebecca, goes for a walk and doesn't return. The police conduct a search with some villagers at dawn. A helicopter has been out all night but found nothing. A van with fake number plates is discovered near Reservoir 7, and someone says it belonged to a man named Woods, who "wasn't the type of bloke you wanted to be talking to the police about." Six months pass: "It was as though the ground had just opened up and swallowed her whole." In 13 chapters, each dealing with one year, an omniscient narrator chronicles the lives of the villagers and the impact the girl's disappearance has on them. All the chapters after the first begin the same way, "At midnight when the year turned," like refrains in the stanzas of a prose poem. Sentences and words are rhythmically repeated. People have dreams about Rebecca "walking home. Walking beside the motorway, walking across the moor, walking up out of one of the reservoirs." A "creeping normality" sets in. In simple, quiet, and deliberate prose, McGregor describes the passing months. The seasons change, "bees stumbled fatly between the flowers and the slugs gorged" while "in the dusk the wood pigeons gathered to roost." The villagers—Jones the carpenter; Jane Hughes the vicar; Sally; Liam—go on with their lives. "It went on like this. This was how it went on." The pantomime is performed every December. "Dreams were had about her, still."A stunningly good, understated novel told in a mesmerizing voice.

Kirkus Reviews