If Nobody Speaks of Remarkable Things

'But mostly there was this moment of absolute silence - absolute stillness. It couldn't actually have been like that of course, there must still have been music playing, and traffic passing along the main road, but the way I remember it is with this one weighted pause, the whole street frozen in a tableau of gaping mouths.' On a street in a unnamed town in the North of England, perfectly ordinary people are doing totally ordinary things - street cricket, barbecues, and painting windows. But then a terrible event shatters the quiet of the early summer evening and no one who witnesses it will be quite the same again. Jon McGregor's first novel brilliantly evokes the histories and lives of the people in the street to build up an unforgettable human panorama. Breathtakingly original, humane and moving, "If Nobody Speaks of Remarkable Things" is a remarkable debut.