Reservoir 13: Winner of The 2017 Costa Novel Award

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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. When called to a hearing by the General Medical Council, Finch’s account of his conduct in the case of the complaint made against him was calmly delivered, professional and detailed. He remained detached and in control, citing medical fact and providing an answer to every question. He made forty-two home visits to the complainant over the course of six years. “I don’t believe I ever lost my temper,” he offered. He writes in even, measured sentences that appear purely descriptive, detailing the progress of the natural world with the same attention he gives to the lives of the villagers. Yet the simplicity can be deceptive; McGregor is a writer of great compassion and insight who can convey a character’s heartache or loneliness in a few brief lines. There are moments of tenderness and others of unexpected, snort-aloud comedy. For cost savings, you can change your plan at any time online in the “Settings & Account” section. If you’d like to retain your premium access and save 20%, you can opt to pay annually at the end of the trial. McGregor puts the reader into the minds of this interconnected web of people bent on various journeys of self-destruction. He constructs a powerful, disjointed narrative about dependency that is nearly impossible to put down, though it's not easy reading." ―PopMatters

Reservoir 13 by Jon McGregor | Goodreads

Those who enjoyed Hubert Selby Jr.'s "Requiem for a Dream" will value the style and the subject matter." ― Library Journal A new novel from the absurdly gifted Jon McGregor, seven years after the IMPAC-winning Even the Dogs, Reservoir 13 is haunting and heartbreaking, the tale of a disappearance and its aftermath--his best yet." -- The Guardian, "Fiction to look out for in 2017" Mcgregor is an exemplary archivist of the humdrum . . .someone who detects so passionately the remarkable in the everyday." -- The Spectator (UK) Alongside descriptions of specific characters McGregor also refers to the lives of peripheral individuals in a striking way. A man moves to the village and people think of him as “the widower” even though no one knows the specifics of his situation. It turns out that his wife isn't dead at all; they are merely separated. Yet, the community still think of him as a widower and never get to know many more details of his life. The false impression about him has been cemented in the public's consciousness in a way which is both tragic and comic. A similar impression is given of the missing girl's parents who are viewed from a distance in a way that we can see hints of their painful conflict, but don't really fully understand or know them. A different but equally meaningful effect is created when we get a slight understanding of the domestic abuse a mother receives at the hands of her mentally/behaviourally-disabled child or the fear of a woman who escaped a painfully destructive marriage or a man's conflicted feelings about his son's homosexuality. Other characters are hesitant to intrude upon these characters personal lives making the reader feel the excruciating sting of isolation.I was completely caught up in the life of this village, its people, their concerns, and their lives. I loved how this was written – the small repetitions to trigger key events in our memories, the relationships and how they altered over time, the village concerns and how they were handled – all of it was so well done I had a vivid movie playing behind my eyes throughout.

Reservoir 13: WINNER OF THE 2017 COSTA NOVEL AWARD Reservoir 13: WINNER OF THE 2017 COSTA NOVEL AWARD

Reservoir 13 is, quite simply, an extraordinary novel. It gives an innovative twist to the device of a missing girl; has a meticulously plotted structure and a mesmeric poetic style of writing. There’s barely a blink when Dr Finch hears the news about Hayley’s corpse being discovered on his car radio. He glances over at his wife but remains inscrutable. Later, when James Hollis phones him to warn about the police interest in the four of them, he stays unruffled and feigns total neutrality. “Ola!” he answers, jokily. Had he heard about the Hayley Reid case? Yes, “very sad,” he declares it. “Jamie sends his love,” he tells his wife upon hanging up the phone. “He’s very well, he’s just trying to arrange a get-together, the four amigos.” A decades-honed talent, Tim tells lies like he’s breathing air. Standard curves from known concentrations of HIV-1 plasmid copy numbers were generated with GraphPad Prism v7 (GraphPad Software, San Diego, California, USA). HIV-1 transcription levels in blip versus without blip groups were analyzed by nonparametric Mann--Whitney test. Pearson correlation was used for analysis of HIV-1 transcription and HIV-1 DNA levels. HIV-1 transcription levels in IL-2-only cultures versus IL-2 with the anti-CD3/CD28/CD2 activator cultures were analyzed by the parametric paired t test. Results Intracellular HIV-1 transcript activity and total HIV-1 DNA levels in peripheral bloodAphasia takes Robert and Anna to terra incognita they never wanted to explore. Only a few skilled speech therapists can help with mapping the terrain. Robert reaches for words that are always just beyond him, “left outside, snowed under, needing to be dug out”. McGregor is too good a writer to push the analogy. He lets the different kinds of courage, knowledge and loss sit quietly side by side.

Stand by Jon McGregor review – beyond words Lean Fall Stand by Jon McGregor review – beyond words

Jon McGregor has revolutionized that most hallowed of mystery plots: the one where some foul deed takes place in a tranquil English village that, by the close of the case, doesn't feel so tranquil anymore. . . . McGregor's writing style is ingenious." -- Maureen Corrigan, The Washington Post Group therapy is an intriguing choice of subject matter. As participants are urged to choose smiley or unhappy emojis to describe their week, and dancers arrive to encourage expression through movement, the whole narrative feels poised between scepticism, impatience and admiration. Robert walks out twice. But the novel holds us there in the room. It’s in these sessions that we come closest to the kind of collective voice that McGregor has explored in previous novels – in the shared narration of the troubled, vociferous, unheard addicts of Even the Dogs, rising between them like a Greek chorus, and in the passive, impersonal recording of the whole village in Reservoir 13. Now the strenuously made words of the group members float together on a common stream of effort. Still glad I read it... if for the unique reading experience itself. But... it’s still not my general favorite flavor choice of tea.

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Most HIV-1-infected individuals on antiretroviral therapy (ART) successfully reduce HIV-1 RNA plasma viral load (pVL) to less than 20 copies/ml, the lower limit of detection for standard diagnostic RT-PCR assays [1,2]. Nonetheless, occasional viral blips (elevated pVL between 20 and 200 copies/ml) occur [3–6]. These blips could be related to assay variation, given the extremely sensitive nature of the pVL diagnostic test [7–11] or a brief cytokine/antigen-driven increase in HIV-1 replication from the HIV-1 reservoir in the context of an unrelated illness [12], or residual activation from the reservoir [13–16]. Importantly, no new resistance mutations have been seen before, during, or shortly after blips [17]. Fiercely intelligent. . . . [An] astonishing new novel . . . strange, daring, and very moving. . . . The book is a rare and dazzling feat of art that also (in my reading of it) outs us, in a gentle way, for a certain gratuitous drama-seeking tendency we all tend to have as readers--a tendency that makes it harder to see the very real, consequential, beautiful, and human-scaled dramas occurring all around is in real life, in every moment (in nature, in human affairs)." -- George Saunders, The Paris Review Daily We’d always recommend you take a paper map + compass ( this one is good), as well as any navigation tools you use on your phone, (we use OS Online mapping tools). Although you can use the online mapping in flight mode to save battery it’s not a guarantee, phones can get wet, cables can break, which can ultimately mean you could get lost. The novel that blew me away this year was Jon McGregor's Reservoir 13. It's one of the most finely wrought books I've read in recent years. Only an extraordinarily accomplished writer can create, and people, a world with such linguistic restraint yet to such moving, even haunting, effect. It's a slow burn and deeply satisfying." --Eimear McBride, "Who Read What in 2017," The Wall Street Journal