Reservoir 13 by Jon McGregor

Catapult, 304 pages, $16.95 (c2017)

I am in awe! “Reservoir 13” is one heck of a book. It’s complex and lyrical, with knock-out storytelling, and full of real world ambiguity and messiness. Take a small town in England, preferably near Manchester. Give it an assortment of characters, the ones who are needed to make a town hum but also those on the cusp of failure and success. Make sure the old, young, and in-between are represented. Speak authentically with these characters’ voices. Toss in a major tragedy. Bingo! You can now call your book “Reservoir 13.”

Rebecca, Becky, Bex — whatever people have called her over her thirteen short years — disappeared one day while on a walk up a hill with her parents. A massive search is conducted by professionals and concerned townspeople, including some of the children. She is gone.

Before you get your hopes up based on this dramatic beginning, you should know that Rebecca’s disappearance is the least of “Reservoir 13.” It loosely binds the chapters and lives of the characters that drift in and out of focus. Some of the characters we meet never met her. They have no well of feeling for her. They did not share in the emptiness and fear the town felt when she first disappeared. The reason some of them have not met her is that they were just born, not born yet, not moved to the town. “Reservoir 13” takes place over thirteen years. Thirteen years worth of stories about the characters: Sally, Cathy, Richard, Jones, the Jacksons, Irene, the vicar, Gordon, Cooper, Su, and most of all James, Sophie, Lyndsey, and Rohan, four young people who age from their early teens to adulthood. And there are even more people.

Every once in a while something related to Rebecca’s disappearance pops up, but most of the time the town struggles on, at first grimly and quietly, then with more naturalness as the shadow cast by the girl’s disappearance fades. Life goes on, as they say. And what lives they are: mostly quotidian, sometimes sentimental, rarely clamorously passionate, always human. They are beset by frailties, surprised by hidden strengths, marked by burdens, pricked by loneliness. They will engage you.

The mystery of Rebecca’s disappearance? Would you be disappointed if I told you that it remains a mystery for the most part. Your need to know will be replaced by the richness of watching the town breathe in and out, year after year. And not just the characters, but also the bats, the butterflies, the fish, the many birds who migrate and nest, badgers, cow parsley. The reservoirs respirate with the rains and drought.

Gorgeous. But not a traditional thriller or mystery.