This Isn’t the Sort of Thing That Happens to Someone Like You
Tender, sad, funny, and riveting, this is an astonishing collection of work by one of Britain's finest contemporary writers.A man builds a tree house by a river, in anticipation of the coming flood. A sugar-beet crashes through a young woman's windscreen. A boy sets fire to a barn. These aren't the sort of things you imagine happening to someone like you. But sometimes they do.Set in the flat and threatened fenland landscape, where the sky is dominant and the sea lurks just beyond the horizon, these delicate, dangerous, and sometimes deeply funny stories tell of things buried and unearthed, of familiar places made strange, and of lives where much is hidden, much is at risk, and tender moments are hard-won.
Читать This Isn’t the Sort of Thing That Happens to Someone Like You онлайн беплатно
This Isn’t the
Sort of Thing
That Happens
to Someone
Like You
Jon McGregor
4th Estate
An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers
1 London Bridge Street
London SE1 9GF
First published by Bloomsbury in 2012
This eBook published by 4th Estate in 2017
Copyright © 2012 by Jon McGregor
Linocuts © 2012 by Paul Greeno
Cover image © Shutterstock
Jon McGregor asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins
Source ISBN: 9780008218652
Ebook Edition © January 2017 ISBN: 9780008218669
Version: 2016-12-07
‘Jon McGregor is one of the UK’s most fascinating and versatile writers’ Gary Shteyngart, author of Super Sad True Love Story
‘Jon McGregor’s writing combines dreamy, ethereal poetry with a northern sensibility unafraid to confront devastating truths … McGregor is adept at depicting emotions with unassuming language’ Independent
‘These unnerving splinters depicting ordinary people in crisis, often against the fathomless landscape of the Fens, make for an outstanding collection from a great writer’ Metro
‘This is a book of ominous preludes and chilling aftermaths: the incantatory account of a vacationer at a war-ravaged resort in the minutes before he drowns; the Pinter-esque power play of a vicar’s wife whose husband offers shelter to a gallingly manipulative stranger. McGregor stealthily commands our active engagement, scattering crumbs of data for us to pick through, gum-shoe style’ New York Times
‘Electrifyingly original and skilful … McGregor also has a gift for lyricism and shows great skill and fearlessness in his experiments with form. I can’t remember the last time I read a collection of stories this original, this strange, or this powerfully menacing’ Sydney Morning Herald
‘[E]ach tale in this slim, elegant book does something most of us wish would happen to us in real life: It stops us in a humdrum moment and reveals how that small, unnoticed sliver of time can illuminate an entire life’ Oprah.com Book of the Week
‘Jon McGregor’s stories are strange and lovely masterpieces: painfully authentic, inquisitive rather than confrontational, he has a tremendous ability to disturb the surface of everyday things ... Underneath that which is radically quotidian, he captures our unique and unusual selves’ Sarah Hall
For Éireann Lorsung,
& Matthew Welton
Contents
Copyright
Praise for This Isn’t the Sort of Thing That Happens to Someone Like You
Supplementary Notes To The Testimony Of Appellants B & E
Read an exclusive extract from Jon McGregor’s new novel, Reservoir 13
By the Same Author
A Note on the Author
About the Publisher
Horncastle
She stood by the window and said, Those trees are turning that beautiful colour again. Is that right, I asked. I was at the back of the house, in the kitchen. I was doing the dishes. The water wasn’t hot enough. She said, I don’t know what colour you’d call it. These were the trees on the other side of the road she was talking about, across the junction. It’s a wonder they do so well where they are, with the traffic. I don’t know what they are. Some kind of maple or sycamore, perhaps. This happens every year and she always seems taken by surprise. These years get shorter every year. She said, I could look at them all day, I really could. I rested my hands in the water and I listened to her standing there. Her breathing. She didn’t say anything. She kept standing there. I emptied the bowl and refilled it with hot water. The room was cold, and the steam poured out of the water and off the dishes. I could feel it on my face. She said, They’re not just red, that’s not it, is it now. I rinsed off the frying pan and ran my fingers around it to check for grease. My knuckles were starting to ache again, already. She said, When you close your eyes on a sunny day, it’s a bit like that colour. Her voice was very quiet. I stood still and listened. She said, It’s hard to describe. A lorry went past and the whole house shook with it and I heard her step away from the window, the way she does. I asked why she was so surprised. I told her it was autumn, it was what happened: the days get shorter, the chlorophyll breaks down, the leaves turn a different colour. I told her she went through this every year. She said, It’s just lovely, they’re lovely, that’s all, you don’t have to. I finished the dishes and poured out the water and rinsed the bowl. There was a very red skirt she used to wear, when we were young. She dyed her hair to match it once and some people in the town were moved to comment. Flame-red, she called it then. Perhaps these leaves were like that, the ones she was trying to describe. I dried my hands and went through to the front room and stood beside her. I felt for her hand and held it. I said, But tell me again.
