Rhythmic subtlety

This divided my book club! I loved the rhythmic subtlety of the ordinary post a horrific extraordinary event & the impact on a community. Beautifully written by Jon McGregor, he skillfully weaves clues, secrets, lies, disappointments & frustrations of a small community into the natural ebb & flow of the years.

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Novel Idea

Must say that this was very interesting idea for a novel, something I have never seen before. In effect the gradual aging of a village and its inhabitants over 13 years. It’s realized very well, beautifully written.

It loosely follows the disappearance of a girl in the first year, but I would say this story strand is minor. This may put off some people. I found it almost like a series of short stories mixed up together throughout 13 chapters. I was particularly enamored of his turn of phrase which is quite excellent.

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difficult to follow in an sudiobook

There is a large cast of characters & with only a few sentences about each in every chapter I found it difficult to keep them straight and to follow the narrative arc for each.

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Keatsian prose

This seems like a naturalists or a mediaevalist’s narrative with the pivot of a girl who goes missing aged 13. Time passes and the world or this microcosm of the world moves on year after year with the passage of time marked by butterflies, caterpillars, bats, badgers, foxes and pheasants as well as the people in this village where the girl was last seen.

A curious detective or murder story where this event is part of the fabric of the lives of the villages, and not the simply the main story of a regular detective story.

Well narrated and good, even if it is not quite what one is accustomed to expect.

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Poignant but slow

This is rather a depressing account about how families and communities attempt to deal with the case of a missing person. In this instance it is about how society moves on with their lives leaving behind the families to deal with it. it is well written with beautiful descriptions but it tends to be quite a slow burner.

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Making the ordinary extraordinary

First of all, Matt Bates' deadpan 'Northern' delivery is perfect for the subject matter of this novel, capturing the ebb and flow of rural life as time passes and horrid events recede into the distance. The myriad human stories contained in the narrative start to blend into one another and I found myself rewinding a few times to rejoin the dots, but the effort was worth it. A beautiful novel!

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Beautifully Written

Not what I expected but I loved it none the less. Remarkably lyrical, highly recommend.

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Just superbly excellent - would listen again

I loved Jon McGregor's book If Nobody Speaks of Remarkable Things (I read this one). And so was intersted to hear this book. Still trying to work out what the significance of the title is but I loved the rhythm of this book, the change of seasons but the same things repeating in a world where farming and life are the same but different. The aging of the people. Beautiful to listen to. High marks to Matt Bates for a well paced delivery. I know this is something I will listen to again. I'm sure that there are clues in here somewhere.

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More like a nature diary than a whodunnit!

Would you recommend this book to a friend? Why or why not?

Easy on the ear and I did listen to the end, but I agree with previous reviewers that it never really gets going and it left me feeling a little frustrated. Some beautiful reflections on the natural world, but that wasn't what I thought I was buying!!

What about Matt Bates’s performance did you like?

great narration

Was Reservoir 13 worth the listening time?

For £1.99....yes!

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Everything and nothing

This is not a story about a missing girl. It's more a story of a village, reminding me of "Under Milkwood" more than once.

There are dozens of characters, but so little physical description of any of them it's very hard to remember who they all are. The structure is not so much a tapestry as a bundle of raw threads. There are lovely phrases, but I didn't find myself caring too much about any of the characters. I kept listening hoping that we would at least find a clue to what had happened, because that really would have been brilliant. I have enough unresolved dilemmas in my life not to need fictional ones. Perhaps the clues are there and I'm just too dim to see them, after all, lots of clever people have said this is great literature. My not-so-clever criterion for deciding a book's greatness is whether or not I would read/listen to it more than once. In this case I would not.

I'm not sure I would have completed this if I hadn't got the impression it was a mystery in the generally accepted sense, and I think it is misleading to describe it as such.

The imagery here is beautiful, but I think less would have been more.
It's been described as 'poignant' but it left me depressed and irritable.

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