I started this book with good intentions but.
I diligently read around 15 % of the novel with the village gossip and nature talks and then started skipping pages. I liked hearing about the twins and lambs and teenagers but the book by 20% + was no longer the story of the missing girl, or even the reservoirs. It was a social commentary and this was not what was expected no matter how well written - which it was. So I'm afraid it failed my test of engagement. I stopped reading.
I am giving a star for the countryside description of thr passing natural year.

Past tense description for the entire book. No dialogue. Too many characters. This title sounded like it was going to be amazing and sadly, it was a complete letdown.

A teenage girl has gone missing in Midwinter. Everyone is called upon to join the search. The villagers and police search but life goes on and the day to day continues while she is missing.
This was an interesting read. Not my usual style but I enjoyed it.

A girl goes missing in the middle of winter in a small village. She is a stranger, the daughter of a family holidaying in one of the cottages. Searches are organised. The community rallies to help find her. Road blocks are set up. Reporters descend. Everyone is hoping that the girl will be found safe, that they can wrap her in a blanket and return her to her distraught parents. But she is not found. And the world carries on turning, there are still animals in the fields to be tended, children to be cared for, loves to be found and lost, a pantomime to be organised. McGregor traces the subsequent thirteen years after the disappearance of Rebecca Shaw - or was she Bex - and how the tragedy continues to to reverberate through the village. Ordinarily I have very little patience with novels which centre around a dead girl. Violence against women transmuted into art is a tired, tired trope in fiction. But Reservoir 13 is not about that. The girl's disappearance is never glamourised, the details never milked for drama. Instead, McGregor focuses on the hole she leaves behind. Her parents remain at the holiday cottage for months afterwards and leave only reluctantly. They are glimpsed sporadically over the years, the father's behaviour becoming particularly erratic. Could they be responsible? But there are other question marks littered throughout the novel as the community remains forever on high alert. The titular Reservoir 13 is unexplored - could the girl have simply fallen in there? The local teenagers had hung around with her during her visits and a couple of them are even hinted to have spent more time with her than they are admitting. Then there is the unsavoury school caretaker who refuses to allow anyone access to the boiler room. Could Rebecca have been in there? And as Martin Fowler's butcher business goes bankrupt and his life slowly implodes, what secrets is he hiding? Could it have been him?

The beauty of Reservoir 13 is that none of these questions are ever answered. This is what it is to live with a mystery. The girl's white hoody is eventually uncovered and identified, covered in dirt. Years later though, a dog is spotted worrying at a forgotten old navy body-warmer, its stuffing coming out at the seam. The reader recognises it as the one that Rebecca was said to be wearing when she disappeared but the woman walking the dog does not. It reminded me a lot of the years I spent working around a town where a young girl had been abducted and murdered by a relative fifteen years before. Although the culprit was arrested, he never disclosed the whereabouts of her remains, leading to some wild rumours among the pupils of the class that I taught. It was also clear what a heavy toll the event had taken among all those who had known her. Two of my colleagues had taught the girl and they still treasured the end of year mementoes that she had made for them, the final way they could honour her memory. But there were also other stranger aftershocks. I know of two former pupils who went on to stage copy-cat disappearances in order to frighten their parents during their teenage years. They were young and foolish and not even born at the time of the murder but still the cruelty of those actions takes the breath away. It fascinated me how McGregor captured these echoes, such as the Halloween incident eleven years after Becky's disappearance when 'a girl from another village dressed up in a white hooded top with a navy-blue body-warmer and black jeans, and canvas shoes, and zombie makeup. She was driven back to her parents, and words were had.'This is what community trauma looks like. People never forget.

But Reservoir 13 is also about village life. The annual cycles, the familiar faces, the newcomers. I remember someone remarking about the village I grew up in that if you did not manage to make it out by eighteen, you never would. There was definite truth to that - I remember in my mid-twenties running into a former schoolfellow who had missed that particular deadline but who told me proudly that she was just about to get the train to London by herself for the first ever time. I congratulated her politely while my own mind quietly boggled. Her parents called her twice to check on her while we waited for our respective trains. But McGregor emphasises the difficulties of social mobility. Sophie and Lynsey, two of the teenagers who once hung about with Becky Shaw, were best friends growing up. While Sophie comes from a wealthy family, Lynsey does not. Sophie drops out of her degree but Lynsey graduates. Yet it is Sophie whose father is able to sort her out with an internship in London while Lynsey ends up working behind the bar again at the Gladstone and helping out in the family shop. Sophie is the one who spreads her wings while the novel concludes with Lynsey discontented but unable or unwilling to change her situation.

McGregor notes repeatedly that this or that character was 'seen' to be doing this or that, walking in this or that place, never revealing who exactly has spotted what. When you live in a village, you accustom yourself to being observed. You are type-cast in a role from which you never escape. A newcomer in Reservoir 13 is referred to as 'the widower' for quite some time before the locals realise that he is merely divorced, leaving them feeling somehow cheated. A single mother arrives in the area and there are 'questions' about the whereabouts of her children's father but 'nothing was said to her face'. It has been many, many years since I last lived in the village I grew up in but to those who would still recognise me, I know I am still the girl who read too much, participated obsessively in Girl Guiding and who carried around her glasses in a little bag until the age of eleven. You never really 'leave'.

On the surface, very little happens of note. Aside from the disappearance, there are few grand events. Will Jackson bickers with his former partner over their son, then they reconcile, marry, have another child and separate once more. We see Su Cooper struggling to cope with her young twins and dithering husband, almost leaving and then deciding to stay. The vicar Jane Hughes wonders if she can bear any more confidences. Jones the school caretaker may be long-term creepy but he is also one of the few to notice that bossy Irene is being physically threatened by her developmentally disabled son. Marriages buckle, businesses fail, life carries on and the seasons shift once more. Indeed, it is this atmosphere of renewal and rebirth that gives the village so much of its character. We hear about the nesting of birds in the church pews, the losses among the flocks at Jackson's farms. Reading the novel, I could almost hear the birdsong. McGregor's narrative voice is mesmerising. He gives the land a presence of its own, akin to a fairytale - I could almost imagine that the earth had swallowed the lost girl whole.

McGregor is often lauded for how he celebrates ordinary lives, but in an interview he noted this as an 'othering statement' since he felt that 'nobody is ordinary to themselves. Everyone’s life story is interesting, complicated and nuanced'. Reservoir 13 is a hymn to the mundane, an intricate tapestry of fleeting moments easily forgotten yet each significant. Becky Shaw is never forgotten, dreams are had about her even at the closing of the novel, her loss still at the heart of the village. Reservoir 13 offers no answers to the big questions but instead depicts how the circle of life wheels on.

This was an enjoyable read and I would recommend it. thanks for letting me have an advance copy. I'm new to this author. One of my favourite books

I so wanted to love this book. But sadly, this wasn't for me. Thank you for sending this book to me.

A girl goes missing while out on a walk with her family. A familiar sounding trope to those of us who love detective fiction and murder mysteries. However, this book fits neither of those genres.

It is a beautifully written homage to life in rural England. Not the romanticised village life of Miss Marple nor that of her modern equivalent Agatha Raisen but the real gritty, difficult world of living in a small village.

Imagine a stone being thrown in a pond. A large splash followed by ripples covering an ever-widening area but each ripple having less force than its predecessor.

To me, that sums up this book. The splash is Becky's disappearance. The ripples are the years that follow and how lives are affected by the unsolved mystery of a missing girl.

The writing itself is beautiful, lyrical, and haunting. This is a book to read in great chunks. It then winds its way into your soul and remains there forever.

Although this book is ostensibly the story of a girl's disappearance from a Peak Disctrict village it is actually far more the story of the village itself. A moving story of how a community does (and doesn't) cope with a catastrophe and a kind of love poem to the changing of the seasons in the English countryside

The ingenious adverts on the tube made me want to read this book and I'm so glad i did! Highly recommended - a book that is worthy of the accolades!

Sublime on every single level. One of the books of the decade. The writing is beautiful, the pace perfect. I felt drawn into the lives of the people of the village and wished it had gone on longer.

I found this an interesting idea - to show the ebb and flow of life in a community after a teenager mysteriously disappears. I admired the concept, but the execution left me cold.
The girl's disappearance hardly seems to matter in the grand scheme of things, which is an interesting point - but I think if could have been made just as effectively if the book was much shorter. The rest of the narrative is written in a very detached style so that we see patterns and human seasons. This is an interesting choice but also very uninvolving - and again, the effect could have been achieved in far fewer pages. I did not feel caught up or moved - instead I found myself wondering why it needed to be so long.

At first I found this book very hard to get into because of the number of characters. The storyline was very interesting about the everyday life of a small village. I found it hard to keep up with who was who in some places, It was not an easy storyline but I did enjoy it in some places.

I started this book 6 months before I finished it, mid reading slump. I didn't get far through - the book was boring, it was wordy and confusing and dull.

Six months later, brain more engaged, and I read this in as short a time as I could fit it into, desperate to find out who "done it". I can see why I struggled - until I realised what the structure was it continued to trip me up, but as soon as I did it drew me into its genius. I've raved about this book ever since. Loved it!

There are more simultaneous story-lines in Reservoir 13 than in any soap opera, but the writing is often at the level of poetry.

From the launchpad of the disappearance of a 13-year old girl, it charts equally the mundance and miraculous occurrences that comprise the biography of a small town over a period of years. All nature is here from insects to the female vicar. Interestingly, the small sample of young people who grow up during the novel are revealed as predictable at times as badgers or foxes. Only rarely does McGregor burrow deep into any of the feelings of a character, yet the non-revelation for most of the characters makes the reader have to interpret the surface signs and burrow beyond the obvious, an exercise which makes the mind flow into the various intrigues, mysteries and outcomes. .

I loved Even the Dogs by McGregor and have no hesitation in giving this book top marks.

A girl goes missing but life in the village carries on. The thought of the missing girl was in the back of my mind all the time. Will she be found and if so, alive or dead?
At first there were too many characters for me to remember who was who but as I got into it they all fell into place. An intriguing read.

I finally got around to reading this book on the strength of its Costa success which always indicates a readable book to me. It is very different, almost like a very well written diary from a member of a small community. A girl has disappeared but although the terrible incident is referred to at intervals, it is not the central issue. The writing is almost mesmeric, a mix of observation of people and of nature, both of equal importance, all everyday stuff but it does suck you in. Worth reading but don't expect a thriller or whodunnit.

A thirteen year-old girl disappears in a village in the Peak District - the police are called, searches are carried out, newspapers are primed. As the months pass, we are drawn into the lives of the people left behind and examine what happens in the aftermath of a tragedy. Jon McGregor has created an addictive and compelling story of village life under a microscope, the rhythm and momentum of the prose drawing the reader in utterly. In conventional hands this would be a straightforward police procedural whodunnit, but instead of ‘Broadchurch-ing’ it the author takes us away from the well-beaten path and into the wilderness. Reservoir 13 deftly manages to simultaneously convey both tranquil calm and an underlying disquiet, not an easy balancing act given the subject matter. This is a novel about secrets, which resonates long after it has been finished.

A really beautiful book that looks at how life goes on in the wake of an unresolved missing persons case. Thirteen year old Becky, holidaying with her parents, goes missing in the Peak District. As the search extends over days, weeks, months and then years, life continues in the village but with the constant presence of Becky hanging over their lives. As she becomes part of the fabric of the history of the town, rumours abound about her fate - from definitive ends to appearances around the world, as well as talk of sitings of what might be her father, roaming the hills, seeking his lost child.
This is a wonderfully paced story, that draws you into the simple life of a small English town, throws everything in the air, and then watches as it settles seemingly back into place once more, but with subtly different ways to before. Mystery turns into mournfulness turns back into mundanity as time moves ever forwards. Hugely recommended, and extremely worthy of all the awards and nominations heaped upon it.

Under Milk Wood, meets The Archers, meets Midsummer Murders.

“The missing girl’s name was Rebecca, or Becky, or Bex. In the photo her face was half turned away from the camera as though she didn’t want to be seen, as though she wanted to be somewhere else. She would be twenty years old by now but she was always spoken of as a girl”.

This short, tender, masterpiece tells the simple story of a village in the aftermath of a devastating tragedy that’s a weirdly familiar story. A 13-year-old slight blonde girl in a white hoodie vanishes while on holiday with her family in the Peak district over New Years. A media frenzy ensues, and then slowly drains away. But life must continue for the residents of the small town now synonymous with her disappearance. And so Reservoir 13 checks in regularly with a host of characters throughout the town, as weeks become seasons, become years. The slow unfurling of their lives against this backdrop simultaneously brings us a deeper knowledge of the individual characters and of the patterns of human life regardless of any one individual. This is a moving, hypnotic work well deserving of its place on the Man Booker longlist.