Contemporary Reads: So Many Ways to Begin

So Many Ways to Begin (2006) is the second novel by Jon McGregor. It is a book about the lives of ordinary people expanding nearly a century although not always told following a strict chronological order. Its main characters are a family and the story is simple enough: David is the adopted son of Dorothy, he is a museum curator; he is married to Eleanor, who comes from a hard-knock working class family from Aberdeen; they have a daughter called Kate.
When he accidentally finds out that he is not Dorothy's child, David will try to find his Irish birth mother. He will never succeed. The fact that Eleanor is bound to depression will lead him to have a brief affair with one of his co-workers at the museum, Anna. All these are perhaps banal dramas which are completely plausible and possibly quite familiar to readers. What McGregor does through his slightly fragmented narrative and his subtle characterisation is to observe the ordinariness of life, as it were, as a way of celebrating the beauty of love, family, home. It is a delightful novel.