Jon McGregor: Reservoir 13

Jon McGregor’s first novel brilliantly evokes the histories and lives of the people in the street to build up an unforgettable human panorama. Breathtakingly original, humane and moving, If Nobody Speaks of Remarkable Things is an astonishing debut.

‘My book of the year. A magical, spellbinding, profound novel’

Maggie O’Farrell, Daily Telegraph

‘A sensationally accomplished debut … a convincing and moving vision of contemporary Britain’

Sunday Times

‘This is a novel of wonders’

Observer

‘This novel owes as much to poetry as it does to prose in its hypnotic portrait of industrialised society … An assured debut’

The Times

Longlisted for the Man Booker Prize

David Carter cannot help but wish for more: that his wife Eleanor would be the sparkling girl he once found so irresistible; that his job as a museum curator could live up to the promise it once held; that his daughter’s arrival could have brought him closer to Eleanor. But a few careless words spoken by his mother’s friend have left David restless with the knowledge that his whole life has been constructed around a lie.

‘Extraordinary’

Daily Mail

‘Subtle, clever and affecting’

Independent on Sunday

‘An homage to ordinary people and ordinary things, to the parts of our lives that often go unspoken … moving and honest’

The Times

‘A book about the search for greater meaning in the strange dance of chance’

Independent

Winner of the 2012 IMPAC Dublin Award

On a cold, quiet day between Christmas and the New Year, a man’s body is found in an abandoned apartment. His friends look on, but they’re dead, too. Their bodies found in squats and sheds and alleyways across the city. Victims of a bad batch of heroin, they’re in the shadows, a chorus keeping vigil as the hours pass, paying their own particular homage as their friend’s body is taken away, examined, investigated and cremated.

All of their stories are laid out piece by broken piece through a series of fractured narratives. We meet Robert, the deceased, the only alcoholic in a sprawling group of junkies; Danny, just back from uncomfortable holidays with family, who discovers the body and futilely searches for his other friends to share the news of Robert’s death; Laura, Robert’s daughter, who stumbles into the junky’s life when she moves in with her father after years apart; Heather, who has her own place for the first time since she was a teenager; Mike, the Falklands War vet; and all the others.

Theirs are stories of lives fallen through the cracks, hopes flaring and dying, love overwhelmed by a stronger need, and the havoc wrought by drugs, distress, and the disregard of the wider world. These invisible people live in a parallel reality, out of reach of basic creature comforts, like food and shelter. In their sudden deaths, it becomes clear, they are treated with more respect than they ever were in their short lives.

Intense, exhilarating and shot through with hope and fury, Even the Dogs is an intimate exploration of life at the edges of society — littered with love, loss, despair and a half-glimpse of redemption.

‘A rare combination of profound empathy and wonderful writing’

Mark Haddon

‘A breathtakingly good writer’

The Times

‘Absolutely outstanding … an incredible book’

Colum McCann

‘Jon McGregor treads with unflinching respect through the debris of this dead man’s home … a short, brilliant and beautiful lesson in empathy’

Daily Mail

Tender, sad, funny and riveting, this is an astonishing collection of work by one of Britain’s finest contemporary writers

A man builds a tree house by a river, in anticipation of the coming flood. A sugar-beet crashes through a young woman’s windscreen. A boy sets fire to a barn. These aren’t the sort of things you imagine happening to someone like you. But sometimes they do.

Set in the flat and threatened fenland landscape, where the sky is dominant and the sea lurks just beyond the horizon, these delicate, dangerous and sometimes deeply funny stories tell of things buried and unearthed, of familiar places made strange, and of lives where much is hidden, much is at risk, and tender moments are hard-won.

‘Jon McGregor’s stories are strange and lovely masterpieces’

Sarah Hall

‘McGregor is the nearest thing you will ever come across to a literary Beethoven. Words go beyond being tools of his trade and become an orchestrated, inspired and precisely designed tone poem for each creative idea … One of the most perfect pieces of written English I have ever come across’

Sunday Express

‘Jon McGregor writes with frightening intelligence and impeccable technique. Every page is a revelation’

Teju Cole

‘Sharp, dark and hugely entertaining, this collection establishes McGregor as one of the most exciting voices in short fiction’

Observer