In the storm, however, they can hear only snatches of each other’s voices on their radios, odd syllables adrift on white noise. Kind and gentle and good, a good man, was how people always described him in our village, but behind closed doors, he’s the most manipulative, calculating man I’ve ever met and he made my life a complete misery.

In brief: Reservoir 13; Nefertiti’s Face; Restless Souls In brief: Reservoir 13; Nefertiti’s Face; Restless Souls

Reservoir 13 is an extraordinary achievement; a portrait of a community that leaves the reader with an abiding affection for its characters, because we recognise their follies and frailties and the small acts of kindness and courage that bind them together.The author’s concern is with the way people go on with their lives, not only in the immediate aftermath but over the course of the next 13 years.

BBC Radio 4 - Tracks, Series 1: Origin - 20 great BBC Radio 4 - Tracks, Series 1: Origin - 20 great

This was no wide-eyed, slavering lunatic, but an intelligent man habituated to manipulation and mastery. His descriptions of the landscape, wildlife, local traditions and economic concerns are rendered with careful precision, so that there is a sense of being rooted absolutely in time and place, even as the lack of exact dates or geographical location lend the story a universal, elegiac quality. Woolf also traces how the sun rises and crosses the sky in her novel while McGregor gives equal weight to changes in nature. What makes the novel so unusual is the combination of its rigid structure – limited to two or three pages for each month – with a restless, freewheeling narrative voice, which circles the characters and the area, settling briefly on an individual or event for a matter of sentences then moving fluidly on.The things she picked up on were the criticisms I’d now have – it’s overwritten, an explosion of similes, sentimentality, overdeterministic plotting. When Anna is hit by the crisis of her husband’s condition, few people in her life say anything helpful, or even appropriate. The route begins with a gentle walk along the reservoir, good for a warm up but then pretty soon you’re scrambling up Birchen Clough and up onto the edge with views across Saddleworth Moors. He wrote the book out of sequence, getting down all the scenes about individual families, and then all the lines about blackbirds, foxes, reservoirs and so on, storing the sections in a ring binder. After a spell of “post-university drifting about”, McGregor came to rest in Nottingham, following his wife’s move there for a social work diploma (her job as a mental health support worker with homeless people was the starting point for Even the Dogs).