'How We Were Lost' by Megan Taylor
They’ve been missing since Wednesday. Two young girls, holidaymakers, who disappeared from West Beach some time between three-fifteen and five. They’re about the same height, these girls, with the same brownish-blondish hair, but it turns out that they’re friends, and not sisters like I thought.
“Best friends,” the policewoman says. “Ordinary children, like any of you.”
From the moment that 14 year old Janie learns of the tourists' disappearance from her small, coastal town, she's obsessed.
It’s the start of the summer holidays and desperate to escape her dysfunctional home, Janie sets out to find the girls herself - unaware that her curiosity will lead her into a disturbing adult world where nothing is quite what it seems.
Amidst growing media hysteria and family tension, her search begins to raise other, deeper questions concerning the disappearance of her own mother eleven years previously. Precocious, unguided, and overwhelmed, Janie finally penetrates her family's silence to unearth a heartbreaking secret of loss and abuse that lies far too close 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”
Nicholas Royle, Time Out
“Grips all the way.”
Nottingham Evening Post
"Megan Taylor writes beautifully. Her prose leaves you tingling. The narrative voice is consistently controlled, the tension is commanded and the reader clutches, fuelled by suspense. The language is poetic, evocative, with layers that are dark and rich."
Caroline Smailes, author of 'In Search of Adam' and 'Black Boxes'
"a dark, compelling novel, with some superficial similarities to Jill Dawson’s 'Watch Me Disappear' . . . The language is seductive and draws the reader into Janie’s complicated world, which features a pregnant older teenage sister, an absent mother and a neurotic aunt. As Janie’s life collides with the public drama being played out over the hunt for two missing girls, the reader is forced to reconsider the line between childhood and adulthood." Mslexia
“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.”
Katie Fforde (Yeovil Prize judge 2006)
How We Were Lost is available from Flame Books
You can also find it on Amazon here among other online booksellers, and in a selection of UK bookstores.
ISBN-10: 0954594584 ISBN-13: 978-0954594589
