At midnight when the year turned there were fireworks on the television in the pub and dancing in the street outside. McGregor’s prose is rhythmic and measured, seeming simple on the surface yet with such precision and detail that you feel immersed in the life of this community and drawn towards its inhabitants. It’s the kind of writing that can easily sweep you along. I forced myself to slow down, reading just one chapter a night so I could savour it more fully. Update 29/8/17: Having read all but four of the longlist, this one is still my favourite. The rest of my shortlist would be Autumn, Home Fire, Days Without End, Solar Bones and Elmet. Of the remaining four, Lincoln in the Bardo is the most likely to change my mind. En la plantación de coníferas los nidos de los reyezuelos estaban repletos de huevos del tamaño del pulgar de un recién nacido. A los lados de los senderos del páramo había huesos de oveja completamente mondos que empezaban a resquebrajarse. Se oyó el ruido de un camión que pasaba de largo por la entrada de la cementera y subía la cuesta hacia el pueblo; el ruido del motor aumentó de pronto antes de cesar por completo cuando el conductor redujo la marcha otra vez. En el hayedo, las zorras destetaban a las crías, que retozaban a la entrada de la guarida y esperaban, sentadas, a que volviera su madre. (...)

Looking at his own work, McGregor was only too aware that in Reservoir 13 he could have written a “great state-of-the-nation thing about the farming crisis, the land use crisis, the housing crisis”. His research took him to villages where people commute into office jobs in Sheffield or Manchester, while rural workers can only afford to live in the cities: the two groups drive past each other morning and evening – a brilliant image of the messed-up housing market. But he stresses that he’s “allergic to trying to make points in fiction”. With his antipathy towards “big drama” he was also relieved to have sandwiched the book between the foot-and-mouth crisis of 2001 and the Brexit vote. He did, though, find himself last June mentally dividing the characters into leavers and remainers. “I started looking at them while I was editing, thinking OK, so which one of you … and realised that yes, I probably could tell.” The passive voice was really deliberate because it just feels very English to me,” McGregor says. “It’s a gossipy village, but they would never think of themselves as gossips. ‘Somebody was seen.’ They’re not going to say: ‘I saw so and so.’ Small communities can be very inclusive, but they can also be very claustrophobic.”I'm not sure that the world needs another review of this fine novel, so I'm going to keep this short. I think by now most of you may already know the basics: the novel opens as a search begins for a teenage girl, Rebecca Shaw, who has gone missing while her family was vacationing in the village for the New Year. However, the novel is not a mystery or a thriller, but instead provides, year by year, micro-updates on life in the village. Each of the novel's 13 chapters covers one year, just as the village itself is surrounded by 13 reservoirs, which feature both in the searches for Rebecca Shaw and in the events in and around the village.

This is the first novel that I have read by this author and I loved it. This is less a novel about crime and more a reflective meditation of the flow and rhythms of nature, the lives and actions of characters throughout a period of years. It is a story of ordinariness, the reality of how life is in the country and delivered with understated prose. I could not help but be moved by the narrative and enchanted by the poetic and lyrical writing. Starred Review. An ambitious tour de force that demands the reader's attention; those willing to follow along will be rewarded with a singular and haunting story." - Publishers Weekly Swiftly along the river and down the lane the adult bats flew in deft quietness and were gone by the time they were seen.” Beautifully written, with an ever-present sense of the narrator being less of a person or a being, and more as the all-seeing village that overlooks all, and looks over all. It looks over the landscape that surrounds them, the village and the villagers, watching as life changes with the seasons and the passing of time.

Advanced Features

The cover of Sheehan’s enjoyable debut novel makes wry reference to the notion that it sits somewhere between comedy, road trip and tragedycorrect, but this exercise in literary plate-spinning just about pulls off its conceit. Conceived as a way in which Sheehan could explore his interest in the siege of Sarajevo in the mid-1990s and what he calls the epidemic of suicide in Ireland’s young people, three old school friends reconvene on a trip through California, trying to help Tom overcome the PTSD he is suffering after experiencing the war in Bosnia – which itself is presented in ghastly detail in alternate chapters. There’s some fine Irish comedy along the way, and Sheehan adeptly pierces the nature of lasting friendship, even if it sometimes teeters on the edge of caricature. In many ways, nothing else momentous happens; just regular village life, albeit tainted and scarred. I don’t know where we get this idea that the countryside is unchanging,” says the novelist Amanda Craig. “It’s atomised and isolated. It’s overlooked and undervalued. But it’s violently changing beneath our noses.”

Jon McGregor by the ‘Hardy tree’ in St Pancras graveyard, London, growing from gravestones moved while Thomas Hardy worked there. Photograph: Martin Godwin/The Guardian I do appreciate things about Reservoir 13. I liked it.... but I’m not jumping up and down over it either.Grosellas rojas, fresas y grosellas blancas; maíz tierno, calabacines y judías verdes; capuchinas y caléndulas, clavel de poeta, arvejillas; espinacas, lechugas, col rizada. Ortigas, perifollo silvestre, cardos, correhuela. Muchísima correhuela, ¡maldita sea! Fuera quien fuera ese cabrón, no era un gran hortelano, desde luego, si dejaba tanta mala hierba sin arrancar.

Weaving together different characters, interspersing private thoughts with public dramas, fleeting details with life-changing events, McGregor builds an extraordinary collective symphony of community life. It’s the fruition of a project that began with his Booker-longlisted debut, 2002’s If Nobody Speaks of Remarkable Things, which focuses on the inhabitants of a single street over the course of one day, and continued in the Impac-winning Even the Dogs (2010), where the narrative is shared between a group of homeless addicts. “It’s the idea that you have lots of people and they’re individuals but they overlap,” McGregor explains. In Reservoir 13 he uses the passive voice to evoke a communal identity, which encompasses a shared unconscious where the missing girl haunts the villagers’ dreams, and a curtain-twitching nosiness in which everybody knows everybody else’s business.We are there, in the chill and the dark, watching the leaves turn and the wildlife preparing for winter. Still glad I read it... if for the unique reading experience itself. But... it’s still not my general favorite flavor choice of tea. Unlike Lanny, there’s no suggestion of magic or myth, although it does have strong elemental vibes, often with sinister undercurrents. This is my kind of book. Slow moving like the surface of an undisturbed river, yet with currents underneath prepared to carry one away, toss a person like dross in its swirling, or pull one into subterranean depths.