The Reservoir Tapes
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
“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.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
On the heels of his Man Booker Prize longlisted Reservoir 13, McGregor brings readers back to that novel's English Midlands village, subtly shining new light on the novel's central mystery: the disappearance of 13-year-old Becky Shaw. When a reporter arrives to conduct a series of interviews about the girl's disappearance, the tightly knit villagers try their best to go on with their daily lives: squirming their ways out of stagnant marriages, leading Girl Guide expeditions, and risking lives working in the quarries. Becky and her outsider parents exist as a sort of background noise a terrible, still unsolved event that lingers over the years. Readers are spies into the lives of those affected by Becky's absence, and into those affected before she disappeared: the young teenager who flirted with her, the lonely women who once caught her eating apples in her backyard. McGregor is a maestro at demonstrating the reverberations of catastrophe across space and time, building strong backstory and consequences in only a few lines. As a standalone, the novel is quietly consuming, but as a companion to Reservoir 13, it serves as an exquisite elaboration on the mysterious characters that are the heart of both novels.
