We thought you might like our reading recommendation. Jon Mcgregor’s latest, award winning book, Reservoir 13, is set in a fictional Derbyshire village near a reservoir with a limestone crag from which you can see a cement works. Is this sounding like anywhere you’re familiar with?
The setting shares much with Hathersage, so much so that when Jon was recently interviewed he chose Hathersage Social Club as the venue for part of the filmed interviews. (see video below).
The book itself appears to focus on the story of a teenage girl, on holiday in the village, who goes missing just before New Year. The reader feels the scene is set for a meticulously and brilliantly written, classic crime drama. Instead, each of the 13 chapters marks the passing of the 13 years from the girls disappearance, aged 13. It is much more of a story about the village itself, its characters, their relationship to one another, the flora and fauna, their mating, their fighting, their lives and their deaths. Seasons come and go, as do people and our memory and relationship to the tragedy that manages to somehow be both central and periphery to heartbeat of the book. I loved this book.
Lucy
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