Paperback review: This Isn't The Sort Of Thing That Happens to Someone Like You, By Jon McGregor

 

Lesley McDowell
Sunday 17 February 2013 01:00 GMT
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Last year, Jon McGregor won one of the richest literary prizes, the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award, which hopefully brought him to wider recognition (and gave his bank balance a boost).

Being the kind of writer that bigger publishers today seem less reluctant to invest in – quiet, clever, with a focus on the mundane and everyday – that award should have secured him for a good few years yet, and more of us can marvel at the way he drops in on his characters' lives, rendering epiphanic the moment a women receives a bunch of tulips from an admirer, the moment a car turns a corner, or breaks down. Anchored in the Norfolk landscape as this collection is, nature is always present and water is as much a threat as it is life-giving or a pleasure: drowning, flooding, fishing all feature heavily in these incisive yet gently inspiring stories.

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