Critical Praise

"David Carter grows up happy in post-WWII Coventry, England, where he combs bomb sites for things to collect and dreams of one day running his own museum. He lands a job at a local museum and, at age 22, learns from a mentally ill family friend that he was adopted as an infant. Irate and bewildered, David struggles to comprehend “how such a lie had been incorporated into official history” as he begins his adult life. His marriage to Eleanor provides some direction, but the couple is often rudderless, and McGregor (If Nobody Speaks of Remarkable Things) charts with a calculated dreariness David’s frustrated attempts to locate his birth mother, Eleanor’s terrible depressions, their professional letdowns, a few moments of happiness and the way “it wasn’t what they’d imagined, this life.” Once retired, David is introduced to the Internet, which yields a promising lead in his quest to find his birth mother. Melancholy permeates every page; readers looking for an earnest downer can’t go wrong."

—Publishers Weekly

"In this elegantly written novel, McGregor focuses on the interpersonal and the emotional, successfully dramatizing the impact of events on people's lives."

—Library Journal

"[A] solemnly lyrical novel…With grace and almost painful sensitivity, McGregor constructs a detailed character study that is also a meditation on the elusive nature of identity."

—Boston Globe

"Jon McGregor is a writer who will make a significant stamp on world literature. In fact, he already has."

—Colum McCann, author of Let the Great World Spin