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.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
• Release date: Aug 7, 2018
• ISBN: 9781936787920

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.

Reviews for The Reservoir Tapes

[benkline · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

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.