LoveReading Says
Category Winner of the Costa Book Awards 2017, Costa Novel Award | One of our Books of the Year 2017
April 2017 Book of the Month.
Aged 13 a girl goes missing. The whole village turns out to search. Over the course of thirteen chapters and thirteen years we follow the affect of this tragedy on the villagers. We meet them all through brief snippets of their lives. In single chapters, with just their names to guide us, a picture of their village, their rural life, the pattern of the year, through lambing, panto, cricket, pub and New Year fireworks is built up. Miss a few lines and you could miss huge revelations. Kids grow, become teenagers, go to university. Couples come together, couples split. Babies are born, the old die, and nature rolls on. The style is abrupt, staccato, yet gets under your skin and sings to you. The novel centres on the missing girl but it is really about human nature, village life and the rhythm of a year. It is outstanding, stunning and immensely beautiful. ~ Sarah Broadhurst
The Costa Judges say: ‘An extraordinary novel – poetic, haunting and hypnotic.’
Sarah Broadhurst
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Jon McGregor Press Reviews
'Absolutely magnificent; one of the most beautiful, affecting novels I've read in years. The prose is alive and ringing. There is so much space and life in every sentence. I don't know how he's done it. It's beautiful'
Eimear McBride
'This is a book quite unlike anything I have read before. There's a hypnotic pull to the narrative, which has an irresistibly cumulative effect: in time I felt intimately immersed in a community traumatised by tragedy. Moreover McGregor writes with rare grace and integrity, and with such exquisite care the reader would be hard-pressed to find an infelicitous syllable, still less a word or phrase. If people were not already aware that here is one of our most accomplished living writers, they certainly will be now'
Sarah Perry
'McGregor writes with such grace and precision, with love even, about who and where we are, that he leaves behind all other writers of his generation'
Sarah Hall
'Reservoir 13 is quite extraordinary - the way it's structured, the way it rolls, the skill with which Jon McGregor lets the characters breathe and age'
Roddy Doyle
'If you don't yet know you should read novels by Jon McGregor, then I can't help you'
Evie Wyld
'Devastatingly good'
Linda Grant
'Brilliant'
Cynan Jones
'Haunting and heartbreaking - his best yet'
Observer
About Jon McGregor
Jon McGregor is the author of four novels and a story collection. He is the winner of the IMPAC Dublin Literature Prize, Betty Trask Prize, and Somerset Maugham Award, and has twice been longlisted for the Man Booker Prize. He is Professor of Creative Writing at the University of Nottingham, where he edits The Letters Page , a literary journal in letters. He was born in Bermuda in 1976, grew up in Norfolk, and now lives in Nottingham.
Photograph © Dan Sinclair
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