Jon McGregor is een Britse auteur wiens werken de complexiteit van menselijke relaties en de stille kracht van alledaagse momenten verkennen. Zijn proza kenmerkt zich door scherpe observatie en poëtische precisie, waarbij vaak thema's als herinnering, verlies en de zoektocht naar verbinding binnen ogenschijnlijk gewone levens worden aangeraakt. McGregor's kenmerkende stijl trekt lezers naar de diepten van de menselijke ervaring, waar alledaagse gebeurtenissen met een onverwachte emotionele resonantie plaatsvinden. Zijn literaire bijdrage ligt in zijn vermogen om diepgaande betekenis te vinden in de stille hoeken van het leven.
"Our first book, Reverse Engineering, is a collection of seven of the best modern short stories, each followed by a discussion with the writer – on their instincts, processes and ideas on writing." -- Publisher website
Risky in conception, hip and yet soulful, this is a prose poem of a novel -- intense, lyrical, and highly evocative -- with a mystery at its center, which keeps the reader in suspense until the final page. In a tour de force that could be described as Altmanesque, we are invited into the private lives of the residents of a quiet urban street in England over the course of a single day. In delicate, intricately observed closeup, we witness the hopes, fears, and unspoken despairs of a diverse community: the man with painfully scarred hands who tried in vain to save his wife from a burning house and who must now care for his young daughter alone; a group of young club-goers just home from an all-night rave, sweetly high and mulling over vague dreams; the nervous young man at number 18 who collects weird urban junk and is haunted by the specter of unrequited love. The tranquility of the street is shattered at day's end when a terrible accident occurs. This tragedy and an utterly surprising twist provide the momentum for the book. But it is the author's exquisite rendering of the ordinary, the everyday, that gives this novel its freshness, its sense of beauty, wonder, and hope. Rarely does a writer appear with so much music and poetry -- so much vision -- that he can make the world seem new.
Coventry Museum curator David Carter - a man driven constantly to seek the thrill of old stories made new - cannot help but wish for more- that his wife would still be the ambitious and sparkling Scottish girl he once found so irresistible, that his job could live up to the promise it once held, that his daughter's arrival will bring her parents closer together. But Auntie Julia's careless words years earlier have left David restless with the knowledge that his whole life has been constructed around an untruth. And so he attempts to begin anew, cataloguing the joys and disappointments, the migrations and arrivals, the intersecting lives around him. Because once, long ago, a young Irish girl called Mary Friel arrived in war-time London an innocent and left carrying a shame; a shame she still hopes can be diminished by a knock at the door of her Donegal home. There are so many ways to begin, and to live; so many ways to love, and to not love, and to end. Against the backdrop of post-WW2 Britain, Jon McGregor's lyrical, intimate novel explores what happens when our lives fail to take the turns we expect, and the ways we learn to let go of the people we might have been.
From the Booker-nominated author of If Nobody Speaks of Remarkable Things and So Many Ways to Begin A TV Book Club selection
A WHITE REVIEW BOOK OF THE YEAR 'A genuine masterpiece' Observer 'Spectacular' Maggie O'Farrell 'The most gripping piece of writing I've read in a long time: Sit. Read. Applaud' Jarvis Cocker 'It leaves the reader moved and subtly changed, as if she had become part of the story' Hilary Mantel
Midwinter in the early years of this century. A girl on holiday has gone missing in the hills at the heart of England. The villagers are called up to join the search, fanning out as the police set up roadblocks and a crowd of reporters descends. But the aftershocks of Becky's disappearance have origins long before then, and those in the village have losses, and secrets, and stories of their own.
WINNER OF THE 2017 COSTA NOVEL AWARD A GUARDIAN BOOK OF THE YEAR AN FT BOOK OF THE YEAR A TLS BOOK OF THE YEAR A TELEGRAPH BOOK OF THE YEAR From the award-winning author of If Nobody Speaks of Remarkable Things. Reservoir 13 tells the story of many lives haunted by one family's loss.
