The Lauras

Author: Sara Taylor

Stock information

General Fields

  • : $32.99 AUD
  • : 9781785150784
  • : Cornerstone
  • : William Heinemann Ltd
  • :
  • : 0.33
  • : April 2016
  • : 216mm X 135mm
  • : United Kingdom
  • : 32.99
  • : June 2016
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  • :
  • : books

Special Fields

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  • :
  • : Sara Taylor
  • :
  • : Paperback
  • : 816
  • :
  • : en
  • : 813
  • : 2016416448
  • : 320
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Barcode 9781785150784
9781785150784

Description

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.

Awards

Shortlisted for Encore Award 2017.

Reviews

"A terrific storyteller with a flawless narrative voice." The Times "An exuberant talent." Guardian

Author description

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.