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    The Reservoir Tapes
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    The Reservoir Tapes
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    The Reservoir Tapes
    Ebook141 pages1 hour

    The Reservoir Tapes

    By Jon McGregor

    3.5/5

    ()

    Currently unavailable

    Currently unavailable

    About this ebook

  • Following the success of his novel Reservoir 13 (an ABA Indie Next List Pick, Amazon Best Book of the Year, longlisted for the Man Booker Prize, and the recipient of rave reviews by critics like James Wood in The New Yorker), The Reservoir Tapes returns to the novel's setting in an English village where a teenage girl disappears, and to the characters whose lives are forever altered by the tragedy

  • These stories will satisfy McGregor fans' appetites to dive deeper into the mystery and characters surrounding Becky's disappearance, while also standing alone for readers new to McGregor's work

  • Originally written, adapted and recorded for BBC Radio, the linked collection reads like a fast-paced episode of a true crime podcast or a season of the television drama Broadchurch; the stories in The Reservoir Tapes are quickly digestible, elegantly tension-filled, and a smart, subtle commentary on humanity's best and worst tendencies in the face of grief and loss


  • The characters McGregor gives voice to will surprise you; the different narrators are not necessarily central to Becky's disappearance, but their voices fascinate us and offer a portrait of a whole community

  • Like a season of the television drama Broadchurch, the structure and order of the stories in the collection touch upon questions of the limits of knowledge and memory, and how what we remember defines us and shapes the traumas we seek to forget

  • "Immersive, nuanced, and exquisitely strange, the interconnected stories within The Reservoir Tapes are a feat of genius. Jon McGregor offers us snippets of an array of lives within a small English town, which come to assemble the blast radius of the recent disappearance of a young teenager. The sheer range of voices within is stunning, as is the tone, which manages to be at once thoughtful, ominous, and humdrum. No event passes without being challenged, complicated, and reconsidered from angle upon angle, perspective upon perspective. I both gloried in the small details and tactile prose⎯a llama that wasn’t even a llama, the bike grease that refuses to be scrubbed from one’s hands⎯and furiously flipped pages. This brilliant book is haunted by the specter of normality, which creeps back into the lives of townspeople altered by tragedy."—Elizabeth Willis, Avid Bookshop (Athens, GA)

  • "Exquisite and brilliantly styled, Jon McGregor's The Reservoir Tapes is a dark and fascinating story told in such a way that I found myself reading with a furrowed brow page after page. Such an intense character and story development in so few disturbing words. Could not put this book down." —Mary O'Malley, Anderson's Bookshop (La Grange, IL)

  • "In a brilliant counterpoint to Reservoir 13, McGregor’s earlier work that detailed the evolution of the town and countryside following the disappearance of a young girl, the mystery is explored in a totally different way. Through interviews of a dozen or so villagers, all of whom had some connection to the missing girl, or a secret to hide or to share, McGregor creates a verbal mosaic representing the circumstances of the missing girl’s disappearance. Wonderful monologues lead the reader to the cusp of understanding the village, the villagers, and this inconvenience of a missing girl imposed on them by outsiders. What a clever writer!" —Darwin Ellis, Books on the Common (Ridgefield, CT)

  • "Jon McGregor returns to the world of his Man Booker–nominated Reservoir 13 with his companion piece The Reservoir Tapes. This new book takes the approach of a short story collection and ultimately succeeds on its own merits apart from its sister volume. Each story centers on a different villager sharing their story of village life and their relationship to Becky Shaw and her disappearance, however tangential. McGregor’s gifts for the written word and intimate character work shine throughout this collection, and his u
    • LanguageEnglish
    PublisherCatapult
    Release dateAug 1, 2018
    ISBN9781936787920
    Unavailable
    The Reservoir Tapes
    Author

    Jon McGregor

    Jon McGregor is the author of five novels and two story collection. He is the winner of the IMPAC Dublin Literature Prize, Betty Trask Prize, and Somerset Maugham Award, and has been longlisted for the Man Booker Prize three times. He is Professor of Creative Writing at the University of Nottingham, where he edits The Letters Page, a literary journal in letters. He was born in Bermuda in 1976, grew up in Norfolk, and now lives in Nottingham.

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    Reviews for The Reservoir Tapes

    3.5/5

    38 ratings2 reviews

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    • 4/5
      Jon McGregor’s Reservoir 13 was longlisted for the Booker, and appeared on several “end of year” lists as one of “the books of 2017”. It deals with the disappearance of a teenager holidaying in a fictional village in the Peak District and its chapters spread over the 13 years following the incident. Following the novel’s success, BBC Radio 4 commissioned a set of fifteen short stories which are currently being broadcast and will be published in one volume. “The Reservoir Tapes” has been described as a “prequel” to the novel since it is set in the same community, with each of the chapters introducing us to a particular character with some link to the events described in the main novel.

      Most of the reviews I read seem to be written by readers who enjoyed Reservoir 13 and were eager to revisit the world of the novel. Generally, the comments seem to be positive but raise doubts as to whether this collection of stories can be fully appreciated as a free-standing work. In my case, I have yet to read the novel but, in the meantime, I have greatly enjoyed this collection. Perhaps, rather than short stories, the pieces within The Reservoir Tapes are best considered as character vignettes – significantly, each chapter title gives us the name of the its protagonist. McGregor deftly differentiates between the characters through subtle changes in narrative voice and approach and yet, the more we read, the more we become aware of a web of connections between these disparate (and some desperate) characters.

      Most of the chapters evoke a sense of danger and menace, and yet there is often also an underlying streak of dark humour. The stories are also minimalist in the best sense of the word – one gets the sense that no word is out of place, and no incident, however minor it may seem, is mere padding. In other words, this volume might be slim, but hardly slight.
    • 3/5
      Unfortunately I wasn't aware this was a part of bigger set, in that I never read Reservoir 13, when I picked this up at at the Hershey Library. This isn't so much a sequel or a prequel or anything of the sort, its more or less a compendium to tie-in with that novel. And unfortunately, without reading that, there isn't much here to this. I don't really care for the writing style of paragraphs in loose form, written however one wants to write, with random spaces or gaps, with no indents, with no quotations or punctuation at times. Each chapter follows a character that ties in with some other character that ultimately ties into how Becky Shaw went missing.

      I'm sure it is probably a lot better with Reservoir 13 first, but unfortunately, as its own, its not much of anything.