If Nobody Speaks of Incredible Things

Just call me the guy who buys books based solely on the length and cleverness of their titles. If Nobody Speaks of Remarkable Things by Jon McGregor lays out the story of a single event on a street in England. This is the basic premise at least, and the impression that I got from the back of the book.

What you really get, however, is the story of one main character, supplemented with vignettes of her neighbors' lives. I was a bit confused for about the first 70 pages of this book. The author is a male, so I wrongly assumed that the main character was a male. Nothing really dissuaded me of this assumption for the first part of the book, so I was surprised when I finally realized that the main character was a girl. It is possible that i simply missed some important clue that the main character was a girl (i say girl as opposed to woman because she is at most a college student, and more of a girl than a woman), as i read this book mostly at airports and in-flight.

I was further confused because i had assumed from the back cover of the book that the events chronicled all took place over the course of one day. While this is true for the most part, the main character's story is not limited to a single day. Her story takes place over some period of time. The main character has her own chapters interspersed with chapters detailing the lives of the other residents of her street.

So it is fair to say that i was confused both by the sex of the main character, and the time frame within which events were occurring for the first quarter of the book. Because of this i had my doubts about whether i was going to enjoy the book. That said, the secondary characters (the people who live on the same street as the main character) all have interesting stories. The events of the day within which their stories are told ties them together with the story of the main character in one culminating final event with at least one unexpected twist.

There is a sort of macrocosm/microcosm style in sharing the story between the main character and the subcharacters that plays out in an interesting way. Once i figured out what was going on, i found If Nobody Speaks of Remarkable Things to be a really enjoyable read.