Reservoir 13

A New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice
Longlisted for the Man Booker Prize

A “fiercely intelligent . . . daring, and very moving” about an English village haunted by one family’s loss—for readers of The Virgin Suicides and Zadie Smith’s NW (George Saunders, The Paris Review Daily).

Midwinter in an English village. A teenage girl has gone missing. Everyone is called upon to join the search. The villagers fan out across the moors as the police set up roadblocks and a crowd of news reporters descends on what is usually a place of peace. Meanwhile, there is work that must still be done: cows milked, fences repaired, stone cut, pints poured, beds made, sermons written, a pantomime rehearsed.

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. There are births and deaths; secrets kept and exposed; livelihoods made and lost; small kindnesses and unanticipated betrayals. 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.

“Jon McGregor has revolutionized that most hallowed of mystery plots: the one where some foul deed takes place in a tranquil English village that . . . doesn’t feel so tranquil anymore.” —The Wall Street Journal

Jon McGregor is the author of four novels and two story collections. He is the winner of the IMPAC Dublin Literature Prize, the Costa Novel Award, the Betty Trask Prize, the Somerset Maugham Award, and the American Academy of Arts and Letters E.M Forster Award, and has been long–listed three times for the Man Booker Prize, most recently in 2017 for Reservoir 13. He is Professor of Creative Writing at the University of Nottingham, England, where he edits The Letters Page, a literary journal in letters.