A very difficult read - 2 star

You will either love or loathe Reservoir 13 from Costa Book Award winner Jon McGregor. It is to me an odd book and tells the story of the disappearance of Rebecca Shaw, a young girl on holiday at a village in the peak district in the early years of this century. If you are expecting a crime novel than think again, the reader is instead assailed with images of village life the day to day mundane existence, the finite detail of the residents as they stumble from one event to the next, from one year to the next, from one decade to the next, and written in a prose devoid of any punctuation. The actual murder (or disappearance) is rarely mentioned and I failed miserably to understand its poignancy if the author's intention was merely to highlight the drabness of village life…..and drab it is. The writing style is very compact, very hard to assimilate, each sentence seeming to introduce a new event or happening, and over a period of years this becomes somewhat laborious. I have read some brilliant books by the author namely; So many ways to begin, and his astounding new novel; Lean, Fall Stand, but unfortunately Reservoir 13 is not amongst them.