About the Author
Jon McGregor is twenty-six, and this is his first novel. It was published in Britain in 2002 to critical acclaim, and was inspired in part by the phenomenal media attention that surrounded the death of Princess Diana. Around the same time, a young man was shot in McGregor’s own neighborhood; the novel, he writes, is about “how the everyday miracles of life and death go unwitnessed in favor of celebrity and sensation, and the difficulty of experiencing community in an increasingly transient society.” McGregor lives in Nottingham, England.
Review:
If Nobody Speaks of Remarkable Things is a haunting story of the events that transpire over a single day at the end of summer on a small urban street in England. Risky in conception and "daringly un-ironic" for our times, this is a prose poem of a novel — intense and highly evocative — with a whodunit at its center, which keeps the reader in suspense until the final page.
In delicate, intricately observed close-up, we are invited into the private lives of the street's residents to witness their hopes, fears, and unspoken despairs: the man with scarred hands who tried in vain to save his wife from a burning house, a group of young club-goers just home from an all-night rave, the nervous young man at number 18 who collects weird junk and is haunted by the specter of unrequited love.
The peace and tranquility of the unexceptional day are shattered at day's end when the street becomes the scene of a terrible accident. This tragedy and an utterly surprising twist provide the momentum for the book. But it is the author's exquisite rendition of the ordinary, the everyday, that gives this novel its original freshness, its sense of beauty, wonder, and hope.
In delicate, intricately observed close-up, we are invited into the private lives of the street's residents to witness their hopes, fears, and unspoken despairs: the man with scarred hands who tried in vain to save his wife from a burning house, a group of young club-goers just home from an all-night rave, the nervous young man at number 18 who collects weird junk and is haunted by the specter of unrequited love.
The peace and tranquility of the unexceptional day are shattered at day's end when the street becomes the scene of a terrible accident. This tragedy and an utterly surprising twist provide the momentum for the book. But it is the author's exquisite rendition of the ordinary, the everyday, that gives this novel its original freshness, its sense of beauty, wonder, and hope.
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