Taylor, Sam
Entry updated 6 May 2024. Tagged: Author.
(1970- ) UK journalist, translator and author, well known for his translations of Laurent Binet, one of which, Civilizations (2019; trans as Civilisations 2021), gained the long-form Sidewise Award for Alternate History, which he shared; he has also published as by Samuel Black. In his first novel, The Republic of Trees (2005), a group of young men and women trek into uninhabited territory in the heart of France, where they establish a Utopia whose contours darken rapidly. In his second, The Amnesiac (2007), an intensely complicated rendering of its protagonist's search for a missing three years (see Amnesia) comes close to but does not extend into a fantastic reading. His third novel, The Island at the End of the World (2009), in a sense naturalizes the gothic extremities of his first two tales by telling the tale within Near Future sf constraints: the enclosed claustrophobic family in the titular Island have emigrated there under their monomaniacal father after great floods drown New York and threaten the rest of the world. The explosive escape of its protagonists from their island prison, though hardly unencumbered by obsessions, is a release, though what seems an idyll is soon threatened by the arrival of a Mysterious Stranger.
The engendering premise of The Two Loves of Sophie Strom (2024) – one life exfoliating into differing fates in two or more Parallel Worlds – fruitfully evokes Kate Atkinson's Life After Life (2013) and Francis Spufford's Light Perpetual (2021), both of which also locate Jonbar Points in or adjacent to World War Two. In this case, the protagonist survives in two realities after a deadly fire, in one of which he joins the French Resistance, and in the other becomes a Nazi.
Taylor should not be confused with the American poet Sam Taylor, or the American fantasy writer Sam Taylor. [JC]
Sam Taylor
born Nottinghamshire: 1970
works
- The Republic of Trees (London: Faber and Faber, 2005) [hb/]
- The Amnesiac (London: Faber and Faber, 2007) [hb/]
- The Island at the End of the World (London: Faber and Faber, 2009) [hb/]
- The Two Loves of Sophie Strom (London: Faber and Faber, 2024) [hb/]
links
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