If Nobody Speaks of Remarkable Things - Hardcover

A debut novel for the literary market, its outstanding feature is the edgy, kaleidoscopic style of describing an ordinary street with ordinary inhabitants whose lives are affected by witnessing something that goes terribly wrong in their road. The breathless conversations (without punctuation) and the minutiae of street life are etched into the consciousness with an observer's precision, as if such a style had been encouraged on a creative writing course. McGregor gradually freeze-frames the complexities and personal dilemmas behind the facades of ordinariness even as he postpones the revelation of the actual event. An unusual and noteworthy arrival that will attract some favour yet might also annoy for its contrivance.

'But mostly there was this moment of absolute silence. Absolute stillness. It couldn't actually have been like that of course, there must still have been music playing, and traffic passing along the main road, but the way I remember it is with this one weighted pause, the whole street frozen in a tableau of gaping mouths.' On a street in a unnamed town in the North of England, perfectly ordinary people are doing totally ordinary things - street cricket, barbecues, painting windows...But then a terrible event shatters the quiet of the early summer evening and no one who witnesses it will be quite the same again. Jon McGregor's first novel brilliantly evokes the histories and lives of the people in the street to build up an unforgettable human panorama. Breathtakingly original, humane and moving, IF NOBODY SPEAKS OF REMARKABLE THINGS is a remarkable debut.