Reservoir 13 cover art

Reservoir 13

 Preview
LIMITED TIME OFFER

3 months free
Try for £0.00
£8.99/mo thereafter. Renews automatically. Terms apply. Offer ends 31 July 2025 at 23:59 GMT.
Pick 1 audiobook a month from our unmatched collection.
Listen all you want to thousands of included audiobooks, Originals, and podcasts.
Access exclusive sales and deals.
Premium Plus auto-renews for £8.99/mo after 3 months. Cancel monthly.

Reservoir 13

By: Jon McGregor
Narrated by: Matt Bates
Try for £0.00

£8.99/mo after 3 months. Offer ends 31 July 2025 23:59 GMT. Cancel monthly.

Buy Now for £12.99

Buy Now for £12.99

Confirm Purchase
Pay using card ending in
Switch payment method
By completing your purchase, you agree to Audible's Conditions of Use and authorise Audible to charge your designated card or any other card on file. Please see our Privacy Notice, Cookies Notice and Interest-based Ads Notice.
Cancel

About this listen

WINNER OF THE 2017 COSTA NOVEL AWARD

A GUARDIAN BOOK OF THE YEAR
AN FT BOOK OF THE YEAR
A TLS BOOK OF THE YEAR
A TELEGRAPH BOOK OF THE YEAR

From the award-winning author of If Nobody Speaks of Remarkable Things. Reservoir 13 tells the story of many lives haunted by one family's loss.

Midwinter in the early years of this century. A teenage girl on holiday has gone missing in the hills at the heart of England. The villagers are called up to join the search, fanning out across the moors as the police set up roadblocks and a crowd of news reporters descends on their usually quiet home.

Meanwhile, there is work that must still be done: cows milked, fences repaired, stone cut, pints poured, beds made, sermons written, a pantomime rehearsed.

The search for the missing girl goes on, but so does everyday life. As it must.

An extraordinary novel of cumulative power and grace, Reservoir 13 explores the rhythms of the natural world and the repeated human gift for violence, unfolding over thirteen years as the aftershocks of a stranger’s tragedy refuse to subside.

©2017 Jon McGregor (P)2017 HarperCollins Publishers Limited Crime Fiction Family Life Fiction Genre Fiction Literary Fiction Mystery Small Town & Rural Crime Heartfelt

Listeners also enjoyed...

 A Bird in Winter cover art
Olive Kitteridge cover art
Landed cover art
The Spider Truces cover art
Mist cover art
The Valentine House cover art
A Year of Marvellous Ways cover art
The Valley cover art
The Farm cover art
The Spaces in Between cover art
Hero: A Simon Serrailler Short Story cover art
The Wolf Border cover art
Fireside Gothic cover art
The Long Gaze Back cover art

Critic reviews

"A rare and dazzling feat of art." (George Saunders, author of Lincoln in the Bardo)

"McGregor writes with such grace and precision, with love even, about who and where we are, that he leaves behind all other writers of his generation." (Sarah Hall, author of The Wolf Border)

"Reservoir 13 is quite extraordinary – the way it’s structured, the way it rolls, the skill with which Jon McGregor lets the characters breathe and age." (Roddy Doyle, author of Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha)
All stars
Most relevant  
This divided my book club! I loved the rhythmic subtlety of the ordinary post a horrific extraordinary event & the impact on a community. Beautifully written by Jon McGregor, he skillfully weaves clues, secrets, lies, disappointments & frustrations of a small community into the natural ebb & flow of the years.

Rhythmic subtlety

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
Must say that this was very interesting idea for a novel, something I have never seen before. In effect the gradual aging of a village and its inhabitants over 13 years. It’s realized very well, beautifully written.

It loosely follows the disappearance of a girl in the first year, but I would say this story strand is minor. This may put off some people. I found it almost like a series of short stories mixed up together throughout 13 chapters. I was particularly enamored of his turn of phrase which is quite excellent.

Novel Idea

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
There is a large cast of characters & with only a few sentences about each in every chapter I found it difficult to keep them straight and to follow the narrative arc for each.

difficult to follow in an sudiobook

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
This seems like a naturalists or a mediaevalist’s narrative with the pivot of a girl who goes missing aged 13. Time passes and the world or this microcosm of the world moves on year after year with the passage of time marked by butterflies, caterpillars, bats, badgers, foxes and pheasants as well as the people in this village where the girl was last seen.

A curious detective or murder story where this event is part of the fabric of the lives of the villages, and not the simply the main story of a regular detective story.

Well narrated and good, even if it is not quite what one is accustomed to expect.

Keatsian prose

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
This is rather a depressing account about how families and communities attempt to deal with the case of a missing person. In this instance it is about how society moves on with their lives leaving behind the families to deal with it. it is well written with beautiful descriptions but it tends to be quite a slow burner.

Poignant but slow

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
First of all, Matt Bates' deadpan 'Northern' delivery is perfect for the subject matter of this novel, capturing the ebb and flow of rural life as time passes and horrid events recede into the distance. The myriad human stories contained in the narrative start to blend into one another and I found myself rewinding a few times to rejoin the dots, but the effort was worth it. A beautiful novel!

Making the ordinary extraordinary

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
Not what I expected but I loved it none the less. Remarkably lyrical, highly recommend.

Beautifully Written

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
I loved Jon McGregor's book If Nobody Speaks of Remarkable Things (I read this one). And so was intersted to hear this book. Still trying to work out what the significance of the title is but I loved the rhythm of this book, the change of seasons but the same things repeating in a world where farming and life are the same but different. The aging of the people. Beautiful to listen to. High marks to Matt Bates for a well paced delivery. I know this is something I will listen to again. I'm sure that there are clues in here somewhere.

Just superbly excellent - would listen again

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.

Would you recommend this book to a friend? Why or why not?

Easy on the ear and I did listen to the end, but I agree with previous reviewers that it never really gets going and it left me feeling a little frustrated. Some beautiful reflections on the natural world, but that wasn't what I thought I was buying!!

What about Matt Bates’s performance did you like?

great narration

Was Reservoir 13 worth the listening time?

For £1.99....yes!

More like a nature diary than a whodunnit!

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
This is not a story about a missing girl. It's more a story of a village, reminding me of "Under Milkwood" more than once.

There are dozens of characters, but so little physical description of any of them it's very hard to remember who they all are. The structure is not so much a tapestry as a bundle of raw threads. There are lovely phrases, but I didn't find myself caring too much about any of the characters. I kept listening hoping that we would at least find a clue to what had happened, because that really would have been brilliant. I have enough unresolved dilemmas in my life not to need fictional ones. Perhaps the clues are there and I'm just too dim to see them, after all, lots of clever people have said this is great literature. My not-so-clever criterion for deciding a book's greatness is whether or not I would read/listen to it more than once. In this case I would not.

I'm not sure I would have completed this if I hadn't got the impression it was a mystery in the generally accepted sense, and I think it is misleading to describe it as such.

The imagery here is beautiful, but I think less would have been more.
It's been described as 'poignant' but it left me depressed and irritable.

Everything and nothing

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
See more reviews