This Isn't the Sort of Thing That Happens to Someone Like You: Stories - Softcover

McGregor, Jon

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1596913495 ISBN 13: 9781596913493

Publisher: Bloomsbury Pub Plc USA, 2012

Synopsis

The powerful first collection of short stories by Jon McGregor.

From the publication of his first Booker-nominated novel at the age of twenty-six, Jon McGregor's fiction has consistently been defined by lean poetic language, a keen sense of detail, and insightful characterization. Now, after publishing three novels, he's turning his considerable talent toward short fiction. The stories in this beautifully wrought collection explore a specific physical world and the people who inhabit it.

Set among the lowlands and levees, the fens and ditches that mark the spare landscape of eastern England, the stories expose lives where much is buried, much is at risk, and tender moments are hard-won. The narrators of these delicate, dangerous, and sometimes deeply funny stories tell us what they believe to be important-in language inflected with the landscape's own understatement-while the real stories lie in what they unwittingly let slip.

A man builds a tree house by a river in preparation for a coming flood. A boy sets fire to a barn. A pair of itinerant laborers sit by a lake and talk,while fighter-planes fly low overhead and prepare for war. This Isn't the Sort of Thing That Happens to Someone Like You is an intricate exploration of isolation, self-discovery, and the impact of place on the human psyche.

Praise for Even the Dogs:

"A rare combination of profound empathy and wonderful writing." -Mark Haddon, author of The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time

About this title

About the Author

Jon McGregor is the author of the critically acclaimed If Nobody Speaks of Remarkable Things, So Many Ways To Begin, and Even The Dogs. He is the winner of the Betty Trask Prize and the Somerset Maugham Award, has twice been longlisted for the Man Booker Prize, and was the runner-up in the 2010 BBC National Short Story Award. He was born in Bermuda in 1976. He grew up in Norfolk and now lives in Nottingham, England.

Edition details

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Pub Plc USA
• Publication date: 2012
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1596913495
• ISBN 13: 9781596913493
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 262