The Reservoir Tapes by Jon Mcgregor

The Reservoir Tapes by Jon Mcgregor

A companion piece to his Man Booker-longlisted Reservoir 13, McGregor's latest works perfectly well as a standalone, offering an alternately sweet and suspenseful depiction of a community as it reacts, person by person, to the disappearance of a teenage girl. --Entertainment Weekly

A teenage girl has gone missing. The whole community has been called upon to join the search. And now an interviewer arrives, intent on capturing the community's unstable stories about life in the weeks and months before Becky Shaw vanished.

Each villager has a memory to share or a secret to conceal, a connection to Becky that they are trying to make or break. A young wife pushes against the boundaries of her marriage, and another seeks a means of surviving within hers. A group of teenagers dare one another to jump into a flooded quarry, the weakest swimmer still awaiting his turn. A laborer lies trapped under rocks and dry limestone dust as his fellow workers attempt a risky rescue. And meanwhile a fractured portrait of Becky emerges at the edges of our vision--a girl swimming, climbing, and smearing dirt onto a scared boy's face, images to be cherished and challenged as the search for her goes on.

Jon McGregor's first novel, released in the United Kingdom in 2002 to great acclaim, was inspired in part by the unprecedented media coverage surrounding Princess Diana's death. He's written a lot of short tales, which helped him to construct several of his novels. In 2006, he established the Nottingham Writer's Studio and taught a course at Arvon. McGregor is an English actor who lives in Nottingham.