In this Booker Prize-nominated "dream of a novel," ordinary middle-class lives converge and collide one summer day in England (The Times).
In delicate, intricately observed close-up, this novel makes us privy to the private lives of residents of a quiet street over the course of a single day.
If Nobody Speaks of Remarkable Things explores the hopes, fears, and unspoken despairs of a diverse community: a single father with painfully scarred hands; a group of young club-goers just home from an all-night rave, sweetly high and mulling over vague dreams; and the nervous young man at number 18 who collects weird urban junk and is haunted by the specter of unrequited love. What eventually unites them is an utterly surprising and terrible twist of fate that shatters their everyday, ordinary tranquility, and all that they take for granted.
A prose poem of a novel with a mystery at its center that "recalls To The Lighthouse or Mrs. Dalloway" (The Times), If Nobody Speaks of Remarkable Things was the recipient of the Somerset Maugham Award and the Betty Trask Award, and was named one of the best books of the year by the Los Angeles Times. It is, in the words of Ali Smith, "a tremendous read."
"A wonderful evocation of the beauty and horror of the literally everyday." -- Booklist, starred review
"Absolutely resplendent . . . does for urban England what John Cheever did for Westchester County." -- Bookpage
Publishers Weekly,McGregor's poignant, Booker-nominated debut examines in loving detail a day in the lives of the inhabitants of a single British block. It is a day like any other-a woman prepares breakfast for her family, boys play cricket, a man washes his car-until a terrible accident occurs, which is witnessed by all the neighbors but concealed from readers until the novel's end. Drifting from apartment to house to yard, McGregor reveals the stories found in each: there is the couple who fight bitterly and have brilliant sex; the man with hands scarred from trying, unsuccessfully, to save his wife from a fire; the aging veteran keeping from his wife the truth of his imminent demise. Weaving through these tales of the transcendental ordinary is the first-person narrative of a girl coming to terms with her unexpected pregnancy after a one-night stand. Her lover's twin brother arrives to drive her to her parents, but doesn't tell her the truth about his brother's absence; the girl's mother has her own secrets. McGregor's rapt attention to the exquisiteness of daily life sometimes makes his details ring falsely portentous, and his unwavering focus on minutiae-rain, traffic lights-can be wearying. But as the man with the scarred hands remarks, "there are many things you could miss if you are not paying careful attention. There are remarkable things all the time." This is the guiding principle of McGregor's novel, one that requires patience but yields ample rewards. (Nov. 4) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
