Jon McGregor

A new novel from celebrated British novelist Jon McGregor--twice longlisted for the Man Booker Prize--Reservoir 13 tells the story of a whole English village haunted by one family's loss.

Reservoir 13

A. D. Knapp

I won an ARC of this novel from Goodreads Giveaways.

Resevoir 13 by Jon McGregor is a brilliant inversion of the missing girl procedural/thriller novel. The novel opens with the disappearance of a 13 year old girl named Rebecca, or Becky, or Bex and almost immediately sets out to subvert the reader's expectations for a story that opens with such an event.

Instead of following the investigation into Rebecca's disappearance, or following along with Rebecca herself, we are slowly drawn into the rhythms and flow of the community of the small village in which the disappearance occurred like a leaf being drawn into the current of a run of water after a heavy summer cloudburst. 

The reader quickly realizes that the disappearance of the girl is just one of a multitude of threads that weave together to make up life in the village. Births and deaths. Dry spells and wet. Sowing and harvest. Romance and regret. Entropy and renewal. Clock forward, clock back. The circle of natural life. As each year passes, McGregor picks out each of these threads in turn and gives it the spotlight for a few sentences before plucking another. The effect is cumulative and by the end, borders on hypnotic.

This novel is both bigger and smaller than the expected missing girl story. The pulse never rises. The heartbeat never spikes. It is a slow, absorbing read that takes a certain amount of investment from the reader, but is told with such careful skill that it's well worth the time and effort. A unique take on a well-worn genre that I'd recommend to anyone who cared to listen. Five stars.

Will Vunderink

McGregor can't decide if he wants to write pastoral poetry or a novel of small-town life. So he imposes two structures on his novel to see if anything sticks: one is Wallace Stevens' "Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird," which provides the novel's epigraph and is alluded to approximately once per chapter (13!) by (ahem...) mentioning a blackbird. The second is a red herring missing-person plot, never to be solved—a dash of Tana French to keep the reader reading on. 

Nothing sticks. And McGregor manages to produce some of the most monotonous prose you will come across:

"Brian Fletcher was still brooding on the fire and Sally knew to leave him alone. The Fletchers' house was a big one and they each had enough space to themselves. He'd been cut off from the family's wealth but he'd been allowed to hold on to the house. They couldn't afford to keep it up but they did their best. It was a square Georgian town house that was out of all proportion with the rest of the street. It had been the vicarage at one time." (p. 216)

Hellboy TCR

From the award-winning author of If Nobody Speaks of Remarkable Things and Even the Dogs. Reservoir 13 tells the story of many lives haunted by one family's loss. Midwinter in the early years of this century. A teenage girl on holiday has gone missing in the hills at the heart of England. The villagers are called up to join the search, fanning out across the moors as the police set up roadblocks and a crowd of news reporters descends on their usually quiet home. Meanwhile, there is work that must still be done: cows milked, fences repaired, stone cut, pints poured, beds made, sermons written, a pantomime rehearsed. The search for the missing girl goes on, but so does everyday life. As it must. As the seasons unfold there are those who leave the village and those who are pulled back; those who come together or break apart. There are births and deaths; secrets kept and exposed; livelihoods made and lost; small kindnesses and unanticipated betrayals. Bats hang in the eaves of the church and herons stand sentry in the river; fieldfares flock in the hawthorn trees and badgers and foxes prowl deep in the woods - mating and fighting, hunting and dying. 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 stranger's tragedy refuse to subside.

Amanda Wells

My least favourite of the Man Booker longlist this year, this book was hard to rate. Certainly it was difficult to become attached to, since the book is seemingly about a community of people, rather than any one protagonist. It was familiar in its individual story lines, but foreign in the remove I felt throughout... I noted it felt at times to be a really long epilogue. 

It was intriguing, and it was interesting (some times more than others), but it was also difficult to keep track of, and I wanted more emotional pull through these people - but wasn't able to get it as we were constantly shifting perspective.

Although I've put it at a three star rating here, there is a chance it is realistically closer to a four star, as I feel I'll be thinking about it for a long time still. Just unfortunate that I read it after the last Man Booker finalist on my list, Elmet, which blew me out of the water on so many levels. Reservoir 13 doesn't pack quite the punch as Elmet - but I don't think it means to, so it probably isn't a fare comparison.

Helen Bright

Sara Sunshine

Andréa Mellalieu

Robert Hinchcliffe

WINNER OF THE 2017 COSTA NOVEL AWARD A GUARDIAN BOOK OF THE YEAR AN FT BOOK OF THE YEAR A TLS BOOK OF THE YEAR A TELEGRAPH BOOK OF THE YEAR From the award-winning author of If Nobody Speaks of Remarkable Things. Reservoir 13 tells the story of many lives haunted by one family's loss.

Reservoir 13

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