Taylor, Sam
Entry updated 12 September 2022. Tagged: Author.
(1970- ) UK journalist, translator and author in whose 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, and in whose second, The Amnesiac (2007), is an intensely complicated rendering of its protagonist's search for a missing three years 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. [JC]
Sam Taylor
born 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/]
links
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