Price: £8
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How We Were Lost by Megan Taylor
It’s the start of the summer holidays, and two young girls have gone missing from a small seaside town. 14 year old Janie often daydreams to escape the lonely reality of her dysfunctional, motherless family and her hostile peers - but when the girls disappear from her local beach, her fantasies become obsession. While tourists and television crews swarm the town, she begins a search of her own, unaware that it will lead her into a disturbing adult world where nothing is quite as it seems.
As the media hysteria continues, and tensions within the family increase, her search begins to raise other, deeper questions concerning the disappearance of her own mother eleven years ago. Precocious, unguided, and overwhelmed, Janie finally penetrates her family’s silence to unearth a heartbreaking secret of loss and abuse that lies far closer to home.
Marking a superb debut novel, this contemporary story is fired with suspense and emotion as Taylor’s compelling writing paints the trauma and longing of a gifted teenage girl who is desperate to make sense of her self and her life.
“Taylor writes beautiful, intense prose, richly evocative and with a strong appeal to the senses that’s as vivid as it is tactile...Recommended.”
Nicholas Royle, Time Out
“Grips all the way.”
Nottingham Evening Post
“An exceedingly intense book [written] in rich, highly sensual prose. I read it in one sitting, staying up far too late to finish it. Utterly gripping. It comes highly recommended.”
Bookbag.co.uk
“Taylor has a rich prose style and strong linguistic imagination that are particularly well suited to the numerous dream and hallucination scenes…the language truly soars.”
Bookmunch.co.uk
“The acute handling of subject matter and Taylor’s eye for detail work to lend the reader a sense of what it means to search, to really search, for someone or something, only to find that the process of discovery is perhaps paramount to the outcome itself. One emerges with a somewhat sharpened sense of, to paraphrase Taylor, how easily it can all come apart…This book was such a joy to read - it was, unfortunately, over in one sitting!”
PrickOfTheSpindle.com
How We Were Lost was placed 2nd in the novel category of the international Yeovil Prize 2006 (Betty Bolingbroke-Kent Award).
“A superior and moving novel that explores a thought provoking subject with a delicate touch. A remarkable debut.”
Margaret Graham (Yeovil Prize co-founder)
“Beautiful writing, page turning tension, and the subject will grab the heart straight away. I was frustrated when I had no more to read.”
Katie Fforde (Yeovil Prize judge 2006)
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