Reservoir 13: Winner of The 2017 Costa Novel Award

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A new novel from the absurdly gifted Jon McGregor, seven years after the IMPAC-winning Even the Dogs, Reservoir 13 is haunting and heartbreaking, the tale of a disappearance and its aftermath--his best yet." -- The Guardian, "Fiction to look out for in 2017" Aphasia takes Robert and Anna to terra incognita they never wanted to explore. Only a few skilled speech therapists can help with mapping the terrain. Robert reaches for words that are always just beyond him, “left outside, snowed under, needing to be dug out”. McGregor is too good a writer to push the analogy. He lets the different kinds of courage, knowledge and loss sit quietly side by side.

Reservoir 13 by Jon McGregor — life goes on : BookerTalk Reservoir 13 by Jon McGregor — life goes on : BookerTalk

Is this novel a murder mystery at all? What is it? By it's end, does the book shed any light on the first question posed in this set of discussion questions: why is it always a little girl who goes missing? The day after I finished reading the book, I watched an episode of Grand Designs (UK) about a house being built in the Peak District of Derbyshire, and there was an introductory feature on the well-dressing taking place in the village. I couldn’t believe it!Weaving together different characters, interspersing private thoughts with public dramas, fleeting details with life-changing events, McGregor builds an extraordinary collective symphony of community life. It’s the fruition of a project that began with his Booker-longlisted debut, 2002’s If Nobody Speaks of Remarkable Things, which focuses on the inhabitants of a single street over the course of one day, and continued in the Impac-winning Even the Dogs (2010), where the narrative is shared between a group of homeless addicts. “It’s the idea that you have lots of people and they’re individuals but they overlap,” McGregor explains. In Reservoir 13 he uses the passive voice to evoke a communal identity, which encompasses a shared unconscious where the missing girl haunts the villagers’ dreams, and a curtain-twitching nosiness in which everybody knows everybody else’s business. Controlling a situation being paramount to a character like Tim, when he told his wife and daughters that he was being questioned in relation to Hayley Reid’s disappearance, he downplayed everything, shrugging it all off as “pretty tedious”. When his daughter expressed sympathy for Hayley’s parents, Tim agreed, saying “I know, it’s just brutal for them. I can’t even begin to imagine.” That’s the absolute truth. “On an intellectual level I understand the pain I’ve caused,” he later tells the police, but imagining how it feels is entirely beyond him. He felt as though he were holding the three of them, holding this room, this house. They made him feel at once immensely capable and immensely not up to the task.”

Reservoir 13 by Jon McGregor — Lonesome Reader Reservoir 13 by Jon McGregor — Lonesome Reader

There’s barely a blink when Dr Finch hears the news about Hayley’s corpse being discovered on his car radio. He glances over at his wife but remains inscrutable. Later, when James Hollis phones him to warn about the police interest in the four of them, he stays unruffled and feigns total neutrality. “Ola!” he answers, jokily. Had he heard about the Hayley Reid case? Yes, “very sad,” he declares it. “Jamie sends his love,” he tells his wife upon hanging up the phone. “He’s very well, he’s just trying to arrange a get-together, the four amigos.” A decades-honed talent, Tim tells lies like he’s breathing air.

We are there, in the chill and the dark, watching the leaves turn and the wildlife preparing for winter. Please note 'Peak District Walks' accepts no liability for any injuries or accidents resulting from walking our routes. We always recommend you wear appropriate footwear to avoid injuries and to take a paper map and compass on your walks. Read more here. Jon McGregor's haunting mystery novel about the ways in which we measure our lives will get under your skin. Let it." -- Bustle