verifyErrors }}{{ message }}{{ /verifyErrors }}{{ A first-person narrative, that of a young woman, recalls a late-summer day in 1997, a day on which a tragedy shook her sleepy street in that northern city. Alternating with these chapters is the slow accumulation of that day in each of the houses in that street, leading to the event that is revealed only in the final chapter.

This urban overture delights in the play and music of language to describe, gorgeously, unlovely details of industrial skylines and streets, and sets the tone for the story (more correctly, stories) that follows. Though this level of poetry is tempered by the idiomatic in the following chapters, the principle of finding wonder in the mundane is the essence of the novel.There are echoes of Dylan Thomas in the opening chapter, the auditory anatomy of a northern city at night; traffic, air conditioners, roadsweepers, lorries reversing, 'sung sirens, sliding through the streets, streaking blue light from distress to distress', 'the rippled roll of shutters'. Through the windows of these once-grand houses, McGregor points his authorial lens just as the enigmatic boy at number 18 collects Polaroids of the street's inhabitants; in one house, an old man tries to hide his terminal illness from his wife to spare her pain; in another, a group of students prepares to leave a life of communal safety for an uncertain adult future; in each of the others, small dramas of family life are being played out, observed with beautiful exactness.