IN THE GLUT OF NEW BOOKS published every year (more than 180,000 in 2005), it’s taken for granted that if you want yours to sell, you’ve got to shout about it — especially if it’s a novel, and extra-especially if it’s your first. Make it sexy, gory or gimmicky; pull strings, get cover quotes, bribe Richard and stalk Judy — whatever it takes.

If Nobody Speaks of Remarkable Things — Jon McGregor’s first novel, published in 2002 — ticked very few of the marketing boxes. A poetic, microscopic portrait of a day in the life of a street in a northern town, it had no larger-than-life characters, no provocative sex or violence — no plot, even. Jacketed with a blurred photograph and lower-case type, it seemed to whisper — not yell — from the shelves.

Predictably, it escaped most people’s notice — until, soon after publication, it made the Man Booker longlist. At 26, McGregor was the youngest contender and If Nobody Speaks . . . the only debut on the list. Suddenly, the papers were interested, and rushed out reviews; it became a “sensationally accomplished debut” from a “burning new talent”. It didn’t win the Booker, but has gone on, in a slow but determined way, to sell a remarkable 150,000 copies.

Observing how the public spectacle of the death of Diana, Princess of Wales, overshadowed countless private triumphs and tragedies, McGregor used his book to redress the balance. The terrible accident at the centre of the novel is deemed too commonplace to be recorded: “There is no pause or rewind . . . the moment is gone.”

But McGregor proves otherwise: he brings the scene into focus and replays it in heart stopping slow-motion. The moment is preserved.

So Many Ways to Begin, McGregor’s second novel, is another quiet act of preservation. As he grows up in Coventry in the 1940s and 1950s, David develops a passion for objects from the past. He turns his bedroom into a museum, filling it with things — “a brooch, a set of keys, a bullet, a handful of blank-faced coins, a lumpen twist of shrapnel” — that he has fished from the cratered fields of a city being hurriedly rebuilt. He visits real museums, and as he stares at the objects, he feels the simultaneous thrill and comfort of history: “This is some small piece of where I began,” he thinks.

David treasures truth, weight and substance, and detests their opposites. As a child, he is awed by a Viking ship in Greenwich Maritime Museum — breathlessly pressing his hands against the wood, he imagines the lurch of the sea, the taste of the salt, the open horizon. When he discovers it is a replica, however, he wants to “kick the whole thing to pieces”. “Made-up things”, he fumes, don’t mean anything; they are lies.

But as a young adult, working in Coventry Museum, he learns something about his past that permanently unbalances him: his whole life, it seems, has been built on a falsehood. It’s his most significant discovery but, frustratingly, it’s incomplete. All he has is a fragment of the truth.

Many years later, David — now in his fifties — prepares to make a journey that he hopes will finally put an end to “the not knowing”.

This is where McGregor begins, with David sifting through a room full of photographs, postcards, letters and scrapbooks, picking out the objects to take on his trip; the things that will help him to tell the story of his life so far. Each chapter begins with a short description in the style of a museum catalogue — b/w photograph, Albert Carter, defaced, c. 1945 — and each object sparks off a phase of David’s story.

Like McGregor’s previous book, So Many Ways to Begin is an homage to ordinary people and ordinary things, to the parts of our lives that often go unspoken. Fittingly, the prose has a rhythmic clarity; an uncanny ability to extract significance from surface. Holding a barren photo album, David’s disappointment is beautifully captured: “There was only the glossy press of the Cellophane laid over each page, the slight ridge of each photograph’s edge.”

McGregor’s eye for detail is matched by his ear for the codes and deflections of speech: when he hears “we had our ups and downs”, he stops and wonders exactly what that might mean; how such a casual phrase can contain years of hardness and loss, moments of joy.

Despite their shared enthusiasm for the everyday, however, these are two very different books: where If Nobody Speaks . . . attempted to re-create life’s random patterns, So Many Ways to Begin deals with our need for structured narrative.

With David’s discovery, he finds himself resorting to the kind of conjectural exercise that he railed against that day in the Maritime Museum, attempting to “make a story, any story, to fit”.

But there are too many possibilities, and his narratives keep splintering: “She kept walking. Or she stopped and she waited.”

McGregor’s characters often wonder where exactly their stories begin. The choosing of paths, the chance meetings — these moments are picked over, as they unroll alternative lives like mysterious red carpets into the past.

In the end, this moving and honest novel becomes a defence of storytelling for its own sake. As David discovers, he was wrong about the Viking ship: even a replica is better than nothing; even a made-up thing can have a truth of its own. All our stories deserve to be told — but quietly, please. There’s no need to shout.

Extract from SO MANY WAYS TO BEGIN by Jon McGregor

He found it hard to explain why he liked museums so much, why he spent so many of his weekends catching buses to museums in other towns, or gazing frustratedly at the building site which would one day become the museum that Coventry was so painfully lacking. I just like looking at all the things, he would say, and finding out about them and everything; muttering as he spoke, knowing that the person asking wouldn’t understand.

He liked the smell of museums, the musty scent of things dug from the earth and buried in heavy wooden store cupboards. He liked the smell of the polish on the marbled floors, and the way his shoes squeaked as he walked across them. He liked the way that people’s voices would drift up and be lost in the hush of the high-ceilinged rooms. He liked the coldness of the glass cases when he pressed his face against them. He liked looking at the dates of the objects, and trying not to get dizzy as he added up how long ago that was. He didn’t understand why people had to ask, why they didn’t enjoy museums as much as he did, and why some of the other boys at school started to call him a swot and a teacher’s pet. It seemed perfectly natural to him, to be amazed by the physical presence of history, to be able to stand in front of an ancient object and be awed by its reach across time. A thumbprint in a piece of prehistoric pottery. The chipped edge of a Viking battle-axe, and the shattered remains of a human skull. The scribbled designs for the world’s first steam engine, spotted with candlewax and stained with tea. It seemed like some kind of miracle that these traces of distant lives had survived, and that he was able to stand in front of them and stare for as long as he liked.

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