Reservoir 13. Jon McGregor
Praise for Reservoir 13
Winner of the Costa Novel Award • Long-listed for the Man Booker Prize • Short-listed for the Goldsmiths Prize • Short-listed for the British Book Awards Fiction Prize • Short-listed for the Folio Prize • A New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice • An Amazon Best Book of the Year • A Barnes & Noble Best Book of 2017 • A Publishers Weekly Best Book of 2017 • A Kirkus Reviews Best Book of 2017 • A Los Angeles Review Best Book of the Year
“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
“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 us in real life, in every moment (in nature, in human affairs).”
—GEORGE SAUNDERS, The Paris Review Daily
“The novel that blew me away this year was Jon McGregor’s Reservoir 13. It’s one of the most finely wrought books I’ve read in recent years. Only an extraordinarily accomplished writer can create, and people, a world with such linguistic restraint yet to such moving, even haunting, effect. It’s a slow burn and deeply satisfying.”
—EIMEAR McBRIDE, The Wall Street Journal
“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
“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
“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)
“McGregor’s lyrical prose and sense of detail totally immerse the reader.”
—BookPage
“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.”
—Publishers Weekly (starred review)
“Meticulously crafted. . . . A stunningly good, understated novel told in a mesmerizing voice.”
—Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
“McGregor masterfully employs a free, indirect style that forgoes quotation marks and seamlessly blends narrative, dialogue, and wonderfully observant, poetic musings. . . . Longlisted for the Man Booker, McGregor’s novel’s subtly devastating impact ultimately imparts wisdom about the tenuous and priceless gift of life. For fans of Elizabeth Strout and Richard Russo.”
—Booklist (starred review)
“The writing is extraordinary.”
—Library Journal (starred review)
“Jon McGregor’s haunting mystery novel about the ways in which we measure our lives will get under your skin. Let it.”
—Bustle
ALSO BY JON McGREGOR
If Nobody Speaks of Remarkable Things
So Many Ways to Begin
Even the Dogs
This Isn’t the Sort of Thing That Happens to Someone Like You: Stories
This is a work of fiction. All of the characters,
organizations, and events portrayed
in this novel are either products of the
author’s imagination or used fictitiously.
Published by Catapult
First Catapult printing: October 2017
Copyright © 2017 by Jon McGregor
All rights reserved
ISBN: 978-1-936787-70-8
Catapult titles are distributed to the trade by
Publishers Group West
Phone: 866-400-5351
Library of Congress Control Number: 2017930357
Printed in the United States of America
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Photograph of girl on page v: © Sandra Salvas
The river is moving.
The blackbird must be flying.
—WALLACE STEVENS
i.m. Alistair McGregor 1945–2015
1
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 stiffened ground and their tracks fading behind them as the heather sprang back into shape. She was five feet tall, with dark blond hair. She had been missing for hours. They kept their eyes down and they didn’t speak and they wondered what they might find. 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. This was no time of year to have gone up on the hill, it was said.