Award-winning Jon McGregor defies expectations with this superbly crafted and mesmerizingly atmospheric portrait of an unnamed village ... Unsentimental and occasionally very funny, this is a haunting, beautiful book." - Daily Mail All this means that I've been really moved thinking about what Jon McGregor did in the structure and style of this novel. It's a revelatory depiction of what it means to live in a community and society. But, at the same time, when I was actually reading it I found my mind so often drifting to other things and I found it difficult to concentrate on. McGregor's successful stylistic choices effectively convey powerful meaning, but at the expense of a wholly immersive story. So it depends what kind of reading experience you're after. 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. But it's not the kind of novel that pulls you into the text so that you entirely forget that the world exists around you – at least, it didn't do that for me reading it for the first time.

I'm not sure that the world needs another review of this fine novel, so I'm going to keep this short. I think by now most of you may already know the basics: the novel opens as a search begins for a teenage girl, Rebecca Shaw, who has gone missing while her family was vacationing in the village for the New Year. However, the novel is not a mystery or a thriller, but instead provides, year by year, micro-updates on life in the village. Each of the novel's 13 chapters covers one year, just as the village itself is surrounded by 13 reservoirs, which feature both in the searches for Rebecca Shaw and in the events in and around the village.

Search Legislation

But McGregor gives equal attention to the rhythms of the natural world - crops, flowers and trees, and wildlife - foxes, badgers, swallows and herons. Unlike Lanny, there’s no suggestion of magic or myth, although it does have strong elemental vibes, often with sinister undercurrents. El verdadero protagonista de El embalse 13 es la vida rutinaria, las costumbres de un pequeño pueblo en la Inglaterra interior, rodeado de montes, embalses, canteras, campos, huertas y animales y plantas de todo tipo. Un simple relato de los efectos del inevitable paso del tiempo sobre sus habitantes y la naturaleza donde se desenvuelven. If you enjoy fast paced books filled with action, this probably won't be for you. It is a gently ebbing book, filled with the poignancy of the cycles of life and death. It is a book to savour; to read slowly and absorb the beautiful descriptions of nature. The writing is haunting and the lives of the residents, whom we come to feel we know, will linger with you long after you finish reading the book. Then, I suddenly thought, THAT'S IT! That's the meaning of the title! Reservoir 13 was never mentioned... THIS TOWN is Reservoir 13... the town where nothing happens and people are drowning in this mire...

A wonderful book. [Jon McGregor]'s an extraordinary writer, unlike anyone else." - Paula Hawkins, author of The Girl on the Train and Into the WaterGrosellas rojas, fresas y grosellas blancas; maíz tierno, calabacines y judías verdes; capuchinas y caléndulas, clavel de poeta, arvejillas; espinacas, lechugas, col rizada. Ortigas, perifollo silvestre, cardos, correhuela. Muchísima correhuela, ¡maldita sea! Fuera quien fuera ese cabrón, no era un gran hortelano, desde luego, si dejaba tanta mala hierba sin arrancar. One final comment: I was really impressed by those entities/people that praised this book…and I recognized most of the authors, and these are not one-off writers…they’re excellent. Praise came from: Clear your mind, settle in, prepare to read Reservoir 13 slowly. Savor the language. Savor the story. A teenage girl goes missing while on holiday with her parents. She is not found that first year or the next or even the next. Heart-achingly, Jon McGregor describes this ebb of time, through persons, seasons, and nature while exploring the paradox that time also stands still. The book is a slow burn, like fire in peat, smoke hinting at fire somewhere, though pinpointing the source is difficult. McGregor is an impassive observer with no dog in any fight, recognizing the churn of seasons and families and friends, and recording how lovers grew apart and found new lovers, or did not, or how difficult it is to keep an allotment well-weeded and producing. Except that the story was his to create and so he must have had some reason for choosing the threads as they crossed, their color and texture and placement. In the end, this diet of village life fills one with surprise, curiosity, delight, and despair. I’ve never read such an extraordinary novel with such insight into the cycles of life of peoples lives and nature’s beauty. Everyone and everything is observed with such exceptional detailed prose. McGregor writes about the landscape, birds, plants, and wildlife through life and death. His unusual structure keeps running on so wonderfully. Time goes on. Life moves on one year to the next. Each year the missing girl is still not found. Each chapter brings us to a different reservoir and gets us closer to Reservoir 13 with a feeling of unease as the book progresses.

Reservoir 13 was published in 2017 by 4th Estate, an imprint of Harper Collins. It won the Costa Book Award that year, was shortlisted for the Goldsmith’s Prize and longlisted for the Booker Prize. A social historian, I believe Laurel Thatcher Ulrich in a discussion of her A Midwife's Tale: The Life of Martha Ballard, Based on Her Diary, 1785-1812, described the experience of reading a colonial diary as akin to walking into a room filled with people you don't know. There's no neat beginning or ending -- important experiences form their lives, relationships may be difficult at first to untangle, knowing which characters are most significant in answering questions or understanding aspects of life in that community may be difficult or impossible at first. It's up to the historian to remain open to possibilities, to trace relationships, to be comfortable with nuance and uncertainty, and to be alive to context that shapes life for members of that community. Inevitably with such a large cast, some characters fail to feel as fully realised as others and McGregor is not in the business of definitive resolutions. But there is no doubt that Reservoir 13 is an extraordinary achievement; a portrait of a community that leaves the reader with an abiding affection for its characters, because we recognise their follies and frailties and the small acts of kindness and courage that bind them together. Reservoir 13” starts with a search for a missing thirteen year old girl named Rebecca Shaw. Rebecca has gone missing in a rural English village. She and her parents were visiting and staying in a barn conversion. The three of them went for a walk on a cold winter’s day and Rebecca lagged behind – and then disappeared.

Because we think we’re going to find Rebecca’s body at any moment. McGregor doesn’t waste the power of the old pattern, with its hidden horror at the heart. He teases us, drawing us on, and we read hungrily to find out what happened. 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. Yet everything is charged by our expectation as readers: everything ordinary has its undertow of significance. When the keeper wades into the river and cuts away the weeds, or when children on a picnic ask about the boarded-up old lead mines, or when the boiler house at the school is demolished, after Jones the caretaker has been so secretive, not letting anyone inside: we expect the worst. Is Rebecca in there? Are we going to find her body now? Learn what really happened to her, or what she really is? Everyone is still dreaming about “being the first to reach her with a blanket and bring her safely home”. Reservoir 13 is a momentous achievement. It’s a book that exposes the very bones of the village, then studies the routines and habits that we deploy to sustain us. But its meaning is elusive, or at least deeply buried. Optimists might read it as a poetic affirmation of rural life and human endurance. Pessimists, by contrast, will regard it more darkly – as a portrait of an uncaring universe that people drift through and are gone. McGregor, for his part, is reluctant to choose. “Well, some people have said that it’s both of those things. That’s pleasing to me. In the end, that’s probably the conclusion I came to myself.”