Reservoir 13

Maybe it's because I'll never get used to a Booker Prize open to Americans, but the only novels I found tempting on this year's longlist were the two most traditionally British. Reservoir 13 and Elmet (which survived to the shortlist) have very different sensibilities—the former is lyric cozy mystery and the latter is brutal rural noir—but both tackle the idea that while certain ways of life are disappearing from England, they are taking up permanent residence in memory and myth. Reservoir 13 starts as a missing-girl story but as the years and chapters pass, it becomes an engrossing ode on all English villages, real and fictional. Elmet is set in a governmentally-neglected hinterland and feels timely and timeless—it's Robin Hood for the Brexit era. Both also intimate that things in the world have always been slipping away, yet—through the consolation of stories—we never become completely untethered to our communal habitat. And I suppose that even though an American won the prize this year, the still-venerable Booker led me to these two wonderful tales from across the pond.