If Nobody Speaks of Remarkable Things
by Jon McGregor
Category: Fiction

In this Booker Prize–nominated “dream of a novel,” ordinary middle-class lives converge and collide one summer day in England (The Times). In delicate, intricately observed close-up, this novel makes us privy to the private lives of residents of a quiet street over the course of a single day, to the hopes, fears, and unspoken despairs of a diverse community: a single father with painfully scarred hands; a group of young club-goers just home from an all-night rave, sweetly high and mulling over vague dreams; and the nervous young man at number 18 who collects weird urban junk and is haunted by the specter of unrequited love. What eventually unites them is an utterly surprising and terrible twist of fate that shatters their everyday, ordinary tranquility, and all that they take for granted. A prose poem of a novel with a mystery at its center that “recalls To The Lighthouse or Mrs. Dalloway” (The Times), If Nobody Speaks of Remarkable Things was the recipient of the Somerset Maugham Award and the Betty Trask Award, and was named one of the best books of the year by the Los Angeles Times. It is, in the words of Ali Smith, “a tremendous read.” “A wonderful evocation of the beauty and horror of the literally everyday.” —Booklist (starred review) “Absolutely resplendent . . . does for urban England what John Cheever did for Westchester County.” —Bookpage