So Many Ways to Begin

by Jon McGregor

So Many Ways To Begin is about mothers, childhood, secrets, memories, migration and the many different ways there are of telling or not telling a story which needs to be told. But at its heart, Jon McGregor's new novel is the story of a marriage; a study of the separate and shared lives of David Carter and Eleanor Campbell.
David is a museum curator whose assumptions about his own history are suddenly shattered and whose search for identity forms the narrative spine of the book. Eleanor escapes from an Aberdeen shipbuilding family and the darkly scornful influence of her mother into a new life for which she slowly loses her nerve. How do these two people connect, learn about each other, make sense of the stories of their lives? How do they cope with the failures and disappointments, the successes, of their marriage?
The narrative, emerging through the photos, letters, and artifacts which form David's personal archive, ranges across wartime London, post-war Coventry and Aberdeen, rural Ireland; driven forward by a yearning search for meaning and coherence and truth. But the story always comes back to David and Eleanor, and to their quiet attempts to hold together something which they began before they could even understand what it was. So Many Ways To Begin is a story about the possibilities of love.

(From Publisher)

Jon McGregor was born in Bermuda in 1976. He grew up in Norfolk and now lives in Nottingham. If Nobody Speaks of Remarkable Things found him a place as the youngest contender and the only first novelist on the 2002 Booker Prize longlist. It has since won a 2003 Somerset Maugham Award, and has been shortlisted in the Best First Book category in the Eurasia Region of the Commonwealth Writers Prize and the Best Newcomer category in the 2004 British Book Awards.