If Nobody Speaks of Remarkable Things

This is a book about an ordinary street and its ordinary residences, and how their lives intersect on a single extraordinary day. The beauty of this book is how Jon McGregor lifts the mundane to be remarkable and worth discussing. A group of pigeons disturbed from a rooftop is poetry and a young girl sees angels in the small flecks of dust flooating through sunbeams. This book presents the world naively through the eyes of a child who still pauses to take in the beauty of life.

The narrative shifts between two time frames, which can be confusing to listen to. This book manages well by using two different narrators to distinguish between the two narratives.

The book opens with a description of the seconds frozen before the event happens, and then cycles back to the start of that day so that there is always a sense of building towards an inevitable ending which you are torn between curiosity and dread about. Several years later a woman who lived on the street is coming to terms with a life changing revelation and still experiencing the memory of the event that shook the street she lived on, and wondering about the lives of the people whose faces she knew so well but whose names she never learned.

I was initially put off by the repeated 'he said 'she said' after every line of speech, but I soon got used to it and it enhanced the poetry of the book. Jon McGregor has an amazing ability to draw music from descriptions of every day life. I loved the glimpses into the lives of the people on the street - their happiness and heartbreaks and the way they viewed the others around them. I felt that I knew them without knowing their names, just as they knew each other.

This is a truly beautiful book about the wonder and fragility of the world, and I thoroughly recommend it.