The Lauras - Softcover

Taylor, Sara

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1785150782 ISBN 13: 9781785150784

Publisher: William Heinemann, 2017

Synopsis

I didn’t realise my mother was a person until I was thirteen years old and she pulled me out of bed, put me in the back of her car, and we left home and my dad with no explanations. I thought that Ma was all that she was and all that she had ever wanted to be. I was wrong.

As we made our way from Virginia to California, returning to the places where she’d lived as a child in foster care and as a teenager on the run, repaying debts and keeping promises, I learned who she was in her life-before-me and the secrets she had kept – even from herself. But when life on the road began to feel normal I couldn’t forget the home we’d left behind, couldn’t deny that, just like my mother, I too had unfinished business.

This enigmatic pilgrimage takes them back to various stages of Alex’s mother’s life, each new state prompting stories and secrets. Together they trace back through a life of struggle and adventure to put to rest unfinished business, to heal old wounds and to search out lost friends. This is an extraordinary story of a life; a stunning exploration of identity and an authentic study of the relationship between a mother and her child.

The Lauras is the new novel from the exceptionally gifted author of The Shore, which was long listed for the Baileys Women’s Fiction Prize and shortlisted for the Guardian First Book Award and the Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year.

About this title

About the Author

Sara Taylor is herself a socially anxious product of rural Virginia and the homeschooling movement. She traded her health for a BFA from Randolph College, and her sanity for an MA in Prose Fiction from the University of East Anglia. Following the MA her supervisor refused to let her leave, so she remains at the UEA to chip away at a double-focus PhD in censorship and fiction. She spends an unprecedented amount of time on delayed trains between Norwich and her husband's house in Reading, and tends to get lost, rained on, and chased by cows with unsettling frequency.

Review

A Guardian Best Book of 2016

"Sara Taylor's The Lauras just persuaded me even more that Taylor is a writer of real gravitas and potency. It feels, to read her, uncanny—a bit reminiscent of reading early Atwood three decades ago. She's a writer whose talent, a fusion of sure-footed, calm and uncompromising, is both quiet and prodigious." —Ali Smith

"Elegiac and beautifully observed. . . . Taylor has a great ear for language, with the kind of sentences that make you pause and read a second time. . . . It is such acute observations of her imaginary world that saw Taylor's debut novel, The Shore, longlisted for the Baileys prize, and it should be no great surprise to find her second novel following in its footsteps." —Hannah Beckerman, The Observer (UK)

"Taylor's sense of place is one of her greatest strengths. She writes about versions of America that few outsiders ever see. . . . The Lauras is a road movie of a novel. . . . A fine achievement, engrossing, original and eloquent, and Taylor has more than fulfilled the promise of The Shore." —Helen Dunmore, The Guardian (UK)

"Exceptionally moving. . . . Taylor’s prose is remarkable; both intense and expansive, both precise and wonderfully sfumato. . . . A joy." —The Scotsman (UK)

"Sara Taylor is a writer with a strong sense of place ... [The Lauras is] a work that looks to combine the epic sweep of America with an intimate study of a mother and her child. . . . The journey Taylor takes us on is often assured, interesting and full of poise." —Sunday Times (UK)

"A beautiful, irreverent meditation of self, sexuality and growing up. On each stop of the trip is a woman named Laura. Each has played a part in Alex's mother's fractured past, and together they reveal how many people we sometimes need to make a love story." —Heather O'Neill

About this edition

• Publisher: William Heinemann
• Publication date: 2017
• ISBN 10: 1785150782
• ISBN 13: 9781785150784
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 304