p.p1 {margin: 0.0px 0.0px 10.0px 0.0px; font: 11.0px Georgia; color: #000000; -webkit-text-stroke: #000000} 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. - Observer (UK) Gordon, farm worker and seducer, has secret sex with one hungry woman after another, bringing them solace. The police hold a news conference in the local pub. He is the winner of the IMPAC Dublin Literature Prize, Betty Trask Award, and Somerset Maugham Award, and has twice been longlisted for the Man Booker Prize. And this is only half the action, because the turn of the seasons, the weather and the life cycles of plants and animals occupy almost as much of the narrative as the activities of the human characters do. - Publishers Weekly

The missing girl, Rebecca Shaw, had been on a family holiday and formed only a few tenuous friendships. This is what becomes of us. The novel takes place over a 13-year period, with each chapter spanning one year. A different but equally meaningful effect is created when we get a slight understanding of the domestic abuse a mother receives at the hands of her mentally/behaviourally-disabled child or the fear of a woman who escaped a painfully destructive marriage or a man's conflicted feelings about his son's homosexuality. The girl is not found, and eventually the reporters leave. Genre: Novels The characters we watch are all warm enough, sentient human beings, prone to needing and wanting and mostly failing one another. This detailed literature summary also contains Quotes and a Free Quiz on Reservoir 13 by McGregor, Jon . Even by the standards of his mature work, however, McGregor’s latest novel is a remarkable achievement. If you want a book you can meditate on and get more out of by reading it a second time around, “Reservoir 13” is a great book. - Paula Hawkins, author of The Girl on the Train and Into the Water There is birth, death, marriage, divorce, sex, romances kindled and snuffed out. The information about Reservoir 13 shown above was first featured in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's online-magazine that keeps our members abreast of notable and high-profile books publishing in the coming weeks. How do we absorb events like these, and how do they alter us? Loneliness is collective; it is a city.”, Thoughts & book reviews from a passionate bibliophile, This blue eyed boy loved reading Maggie Nelson’s intense & engaging meditation on the colour blue:…, The Mirror and the Light by Hilary Mantel. 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. But, in “Reservoir 13” I felt like I didn't grasp who many of the characters were until page 200 or so – at which time there was so little of their story left in the novel it's like I barely ever knew them at all. More time passes: things change, babies are born, there’s a funeral, people arrive in the village and leave, the teenagers go to university and some come back again. Because we think we’re going to find Rebecca’s body at any moment. ); Jackson the farmer who has a stroke and dominates his grown-up sons from his sick bed. BookBrowse seeks out and recommends the best in contemporary fiction and nonfiction—books that not only engage and entertain but also deepen our understanding of ourselves and the world around us. Men and women fall into love and out of it, marriages are made and fail. What is it in that archetype that tugs at us in some deep place – readers and viewers, male and female alike – when yet again the quest begins with news of someone’s daughter who hasn’t come home, or a glimpse of a girl in some place that’s much too lonely, glancing back nervously over her shoulder? It's poignant how a missing child never ages, but remains a peripheral presence in our consciousness while we continue to grow and change. A similar impression is given of the missing girl's parents who are viewed from a distance in a way that we can see hints of their painful conflict, but don't really fully understand or know them. Paper, $16.95. please send us a message with the mainstream media reviews that you would like to see added.

Time passes and the police searches come to nothing, the divers go into the reservoirs in vain, Rebecca isn’t found: not that first night, nor in the days and weeks that follow.

Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. 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. Comments: Comments Off on reservoir 13 who did it; I think it needs to be read in long stretches, so that the author's spell has time to work.. Don't expect things to be wrapped up neatly. The following version of this book was used to create this study guide: McGregor, Jon. The cameras capture the volunteers searching the hills, the divers searching the river. Despite computer generated sketches that speculate how Rebecca might look if she aged, the villagers mentally see the girl preserved in her youthful form and she exists fundamentally as a haunting unanswered question. Gradually, though, as the story unfolds across its 13 chapters (ah, so is she in Reservoir 13?

Other characters are hesitant to intrude upon these characters personal lives making the reader feel the excruciating sting of isolation. Jon McGregor (4th Estate, HarperCollins) Midwinter in the early years of this century a teenage girl on holiday has gone missing in the hills at the heart of England. We can only glimpse their inner lives, guess at their secrets. Here’s a winning solution for our challenging times, Employers can ease employee concerns by prioritising their wellbeing, Think cloud when you think digital transformation, Realist versus sceptic: Two takes on the climate crisis, Ghosts: Dolly Alderton’s debut novel haunts, but not in a good way, Roddy Doyle introduces head-turning young Irish writing, Bruce Springsteen: Letter to You review – Sublime meditations of loss, love, life and death, Nealo: ‘I’m not important... but I’m important to my son’, Viscera, a new short story by Dearbhaile Houston, Britain and Europe in a Troubled World: A wise guide to Brexit, Love: Roddy Doyle’s masterful study in all that goes unsaid, Caste: The Lies that Divide Us by Isabel Wilkerson: heartrending but too simplistic, Intimations, a new poem by Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin, New poem: The Good Going Up to Heaven and the Wicked Going Down to Hell, Putting Irish women writers back in the picture, Celebrating 10 years of young Irish writing, ‘Writing is a good way to process what’s going on in your own life’, Kate Hamer Q&A: ‘Write the story that is burning inside you’, Frequently asked questions about your digital subscription, Specially selected and available only to our subscribers, Exclusive offers, discounts and invitations, Explore the features of your subscription, Carefully curated selections of Irish Times writing, Sign up to get the stories you want delivered to your inbox, An exact digital replica of the printed paper, What happens to people when a girl goes missing.
As the seasons unfold there are those who leave the village and those who are pulled back; those who come together or break apart. All this means that I've been really moved thinking about what Jon McGregor did in the structure and style of this novel. Reservoir 13. We see summer’s end and winters encroach again. Reservoir 13 is not a conventional crime novel, and its central mystery is more than just a procedural puzzle. span.s2 {font: 7.3px Georgia; font-kerning: none} "Starred Review. This is the only conventional plot the novel has, and it trails off quickly. RESERVOIR 13 By Jon McGregor 291 pp.

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McGregor is a writer with extraordinary control, and he uses the power of the archetype as well as our genre expectations for his own purposes. It’s also really beautifully written but there are lots of mundane details about the multitude of characters’ lives alongside details that clue you into larger issues those characters are dealing with.

Theirs is the calm not of life’s big questions having been answered, but of putting them temporarily aside. The British novelist Jon McGregor is interested in the bystanders to public disasters — the people in the background of the television shot. Midwinter in an English village. 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.

I have very conflicted feelings about “Reservoir 13” by Jon McGregor because I admired so much about its technique and ingenuity, but I often wasn't engaged by the story in that satisfying way I hope a novel will make me feel. 304 pages p.p1 {margin: 0.0px 0.0px 10.0px 0.0px; font: 11.0px Georgia; color: #000000; -webkit-text-stroke: #000000} “As the dusk deepened over the badger sett at the far end of the woods, a rag-eared boar called out a sow … The woods were thick with the stink of wild garlic and the leaves gleamed darkly along the paths. McGregor’s fourth novel, “Reservoir 13,” begins with a telegenic tragedy: A 13-year-old girl disappears on the moor in an English village where she and her parents are vacationing for the New Year. In the long run, that made the novel feel so much more rewarding and also turned it into my absolute favourite novel. Catapult. Each section begins with a new year and a description of fireworks in the village. ‘Ordinary things,” the novelist Marilynne Robinson once remarked, “have always seemed numinous to me.” Jon McGregor may not share Robinson’s preoccupation with the divine, but few writers have more consistently affirmed the luminous dignity of the everyday. The comparison between these novels is apt because McGregor's novel also follows a small group of adolescents' lives as they grow up and in doing so poignantly captures the flow of time and paths in life. The author of Orphan Train returns with an ambitious, emotionally resonant historical novel.
Reservoir 13 is published by 4th Estate. "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." There are the teenagers who, it turns out, did have something to do with Rebecca while she was alive – James kissed her. Read 1,733 reviews from the world's largest community for readers. The first time I read Virginia Woolf's “The Waves” I had difficulty distinguishing between the six central characters – partly because the oddball poetic language blurred them into one at first.

A Girl Vanishes.