Hold on to this description, for it will haunt you:
The girl’s name was Rebecca Shaw. She was thirteen years old. When last seen she’d been wearing a white hooded top with a navy-blue body warmer, black jeans, and canvas shoes.
Thirteen reservoirs to search. Thirteen years in the life of a rural community at once shaped by yet somehow impervious to the disappearance of a young girl from its midst.
Jon McGregor’s writing is like none I have encountered before. It is matter-of-fact, yet more than the facts it carries; it is by turns as hard as gritstone and as soft as cotton-grass; it is economical, but never sparse. Every word is well-chosen, deliberate. Each (often quite short) sentence sends you spellbound to the next, in breathless anticipation of Rebecca’s discovery. Meanwhile, the villagers around you grow up, grow old, grow together, grow apart. Rhythmic repetition of certain phrases reflects the passage of the seasons, until you suddenly wake to the chilled-in-the-bones realisation that this has happened too often before, that too much time is passing, that smaller wrongs are being heaped upon the larger. Because, if this community is to survive its tragedy, survival will be as much about forgetting as remembering. Moving on is not only inevitable, but essential, and it is a mark of McGregor’s craft as a storyteller that he makes you complicit in the community’s collective, subconscious, involuntary choice, even as you chafe against it. Which you will do. You will tell yourself, ‘If I were there …’ and catch yourself reading back over each emergent clue, trying to wring more from the words on the page. The ending will leave you reeling.
You will surface from Reservoir 13 gasping for air, bereft without the pattern of the years or a place to put your thoughts.
A persistent unsettledness of wings
My word, I am on catch-up with your Substack. Love, LOVE this review. Pacy, taut, compelling. Perhaps echoing the book itself, which sounds a cracker. Love this sort of thriller ... layered, nuanced. Your writing is excellent, enviable. Adding this to a list of 'must buys'. Thank you. Barrie