Synopses & Reviews
Now in paperback for the first time, So Many Ways to Begin is a potent examination of family and memory, a look at what happens when life forces you to let go of the person you might have been. David Carter is an obsessive collector, and the curator of the local history museum. In addition to overseeing the community's archives, he has, since boyhood, diligently archived the items that tell his own life story: birth certificate, school report cards, movie and train tickets. But when a senile relative lets slip a long-buried family secret, David is forced to consider that his whole carefully cataloged life may be constructed around a lie. In fits and starts, his world begins to unravel.
Praise for So Many Ways to Begin:
"Jon McGregor might be the best chronicler I know of the way small accidents can set a life in motion, and the way what's said between people-or left unsaid-can change everything. This is a beautiful book, elegant and particular and heart wrenching. I loved it."-Maile Meloy, author of Both Ways Is the Only Way I Want It
"McGregor is a brilliant prose stylist, and here he excels at making … the ordinary seem extraordinary."-Sunday Times (UK )
Review
"In this elegantly written novel, McGregor...focuses on the interpersonal and the emotional, successfully dramatizing the impact of events on peoples lives." Library Journal
Review
"The search for home and for connection lies at the center of this slow, cadenced novel, which invests one man's day-to-day life with remarkable dignity." Boolist
Synopsis
The curator of a local history museum, David Carter cannot help but wish for more: that his wife would still be the ambitious and sparkling Scottish girl he once found so irresistible and that his beloved Aunt Julia was not lost in a fog of senility, in a novel of family, memory, and self-discovery. By the accliamed author of If Nobody Speaks of Remarkable Things. 25,000 first printing.
Synopsis
In this potent examination of family and memory, Jon McGregor charts one man's voyage of self-discovery. Like Kazuo Ishiguro's
The Remains of the Day,
So Many Ways to Begin is rich in the intimate details that shape a life, the subtle strain that defines human relationships, and the personal history that forms identity.
David Carter, the novel's protagonist, takes a keen interest in history as a boy. Encouraged by his doting Aunt Julia, he begins collecting the things that tell his story: a birth certificate, school report cards, annotated cinema and train tickets. After finishing school, he finds the perfect job for his lifetime obsession curator at a local history museum. His professional and romantic lives take shape as his beloved aunt and mentor's unravels. Lost in a fog of senility, Julia lets slip that David had been adopted. Over the course of the next decades, as David and his wife Eleanor live out their lives struggling through early marriage, professional disappointments, the birth of their daughter, Eleanor's depression, and an affair that ends badly David attempts to physically piece together his past, finding meaning and connection where he least expects it.
About the Author
Twice Booker-nominated Jon McGregor is the author of the critically acclaimed If Nobody Speaks of Remarkable Things, winner of the Betty Trask Prize and the Somerset Maugham Award, and, most recently, Even the Dogs. He was born in Bermuda in 1976, grew up in Norfolk, and now lives in Nottingham, England.