by Sara Taylor
Critics' Opinion:
Readers' rating:
Published Aug 2017
304 pages
Genre: Literary Fiction
Publication Information
From critically acclaimed and Baileys Prize-nominated author Sara Taylor comes a dazzling new novel about youth, identity, and family secrets.
I didn't realize 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 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 kid 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.
Sara Taylor brings the American landscape to vivid life in an unforgettable road novel that strikes at the heart of a mother-child bond.
"Starred Review. Alex's ambiguous, aching forays into the realms of sexuality and human relations speak to universal truths about trust as well as lust… Taylor gives her narrator a singular voice and dares the world to listen." – Kirkus
"Though there are some underexplored subplots, the mother-daughter relationship lends pathos and purpose to this voyage." - Publishers Weekly
"The Lauras is a fine achievement, engrossing, original and eloquent, and Taylor has more than fulfilled the promise of The Shore." – The Guardian (UK)
"Exceptionally moving…Taylor's prose is remarkable; both intense and expansive, both precise and wonderfully sfumato. …That such a sophisticated book has such a simple message is a joy." – The Scotsman (UK)
"Elegiac and beautifully observed…It is such acute observations of her imaginary world that saw Taylor's debut novel, The Shore, long listed for the Bailey's prize, and it should be no great surprise to find her second novel following in its footsteps." – The Observer (UK)
"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, author of How to Be Both and Autumn
"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, author of The Lonely Hearts Hotel
This information about The Lauras was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Born in rural Virginia, Sara Taylor is the 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.
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