Reviews
The Guardian
Maggie O'Farrell
“Read Jon McGregor's new book. Its verve, its inventiveness, its sheer quiet audacity will reassure you that the short story is alive, well and reaching new heights.”
03/02/2012
Read Full Review
The Independent on Sunday
Leyla Sanai
“Jon McGregor's writing combines dreamy, ethereal poetry with a northern sensibility unafraid to confront devastating truths. This is his first volume of short stories, and each plunges the reader into highly charged situations that ensnare our attention. A false intimacy is created between us and the often unnamed characters: we suddenly care about these people.”
19/02/2012
Read Full Review
The Financial Times
James Urquhart
“High quality global journalism requires investment. Please share this article with others using the link below, do not cut & paste the article. See our Ts&Cs and Copyright Policy for more detail. Email ftsales.support@ft.com to buy additional rights. http://www.ft.com/cms/s/2/c7131cb2-859c-11e2-bed4-00144feabdc0.html#ixzz2NtJQBWBD
McGregor’s stories are subtle, powerful and quietly dramatic. He builds tension in a few deft paragraphs and while his pared down prose style recalls Raymond Carver, the emotional complexities mapped out here beneath the oppressively wide fenland sky also bring to mind Adam Thorpe’s Ulverton or Graham Swift’s Waterland.”
15/01/2013
Read Full Review
The Daily Telegraph
Catherine Taylor
“The pivotal moments appear almost insignificant, but brim with drama and import – the dangerous listlessness of a couple of baleful ex-cons living in a caravan on a wealthy eccentric’s estate; a harassed vicar’s wife’s angry, helpless acceptance of a mysterious uninvited guest ... The prose is picked clean, pellucid. Even a young woman’s near-death experience, when a sugar beet smashes through her car windscreen, holds a purposeful, uncanny beauty entirely of that moment”
30/01/2012
Read Full Review
The Literary Review
Thomas Marks
“McGregor’s prose is as sparse as the countryside it has alighted on, with barely a simile or metaphor in sight. But he finds a bruised lyricism in his care for the short sentence, for the small word, for repetition.”
01/02/2012
Read Full Review
The Financial Times
Linda Grant
“For the most part, something is going to happen or has already taken place: we are in the present, intensely felt. Stories stop abruptly or peter out before we understand what is going on. Facts are in short supply. The cumulative effect is a kind of novel about a place and its inhabitants, told through fragments and recurring nameless characters. Nothing happens, as Amazon reviewers are wont to write, apart from in every sentence.”
03/02/2012
Read Full Review
The Independent
Arifa Akbar
“McGregor's writing is so distinctive that it becomes hard to compare to another. There is a precision and a poetry to his prose. Life, inner and outer, is so meticulously dissected that events appear to happen in slow motion. There is, in these brooding stories, that same sense of impending cataclysm that gave his debut, if nobody speaks of remarkable things, its intrigue”
27/01/2012
Read Full Review
The Daily Mail
Stephanie Cross
“McGregor’s direct, unadorned style couldn’t be more suited to this comfortless landscape, a place of cooling towers, drainage ditches and endless skies … Throughout, omissions and ellipses set the mind racing like a treacherous tide, rushing in to fill the gaps. Not a book for bedtime, then. But very, very good indeed.”
26/01/2012
Read Full Review
The Observer
Alex Preston
“The most obvious contemporary influence on these stories is the American writer Lydia Davis. It's not just the remarkable ventriloquism and genre-hopping playfulness; McGregor has clearly thought hard about the order of the stories in this collection and, as is the case in Davis's work, the narrative tempo of the individual stories feeds through into the rhythm of the book as a whole ... Sharp, dark and hugely entertaining, this collection establishes McGregor as one of the most exciting voices in short fiction. The fenland landscape may be flat and dreary; these stories are anything but.”
22/01/2012
Read Full Review
The Times
Chris Power
“[Has] a facility for conversational prose that can wrap itself around a reader’s throat … ”
28/01/2012
Read Full Review
The Sunday Times
David Mills
“The range of approach in the 30 stories is wide: some are only a sentence or two long; one incorporates a “field verse” poem; another is an artful list of place names. All are subtitled with the name of a town or village from the flatter counties of eastern England. Yet, while very little might happen in the narratives, their telling is packed with such incidental detail that deeper, more complex lives are suggestively put before us.”
29/01/2011
Read Full Review