We Wait
The wealthy Crawleys can’t abide a scandal, so when fifteen-year-old Maddie’s behaviour causes concern, she’s packed off to the family’s country estate, along with her best friend, Ellie. But while Maddie is resentful, Ellie is secretly thrilled. A whole summer at Greywater House, which she’s heard so much about – and with Maddie who she adores…
But from the moment the girls arrive, it’s clear there’s more to the house and the family than Ellie could ever have imagined. Maddie’s aunt, Natalie, and her bedridden grandmother are far from welcoming, and something has been waiting at Greywaters, something that flits among the shadows and whispers in the night.
Hill House for the 21st century: haunting, dark, and very, very real. A masterpiece.
Anstey Harris, bestselling author
As poetic as it is unsettling, We Wait is an absolute triumph. This is Megan Taylor at her most thrillingly dark.
Kerry Hadley-Pryce
Scandal, sex and secrets in a crumbling country pile await us in Megan Taylor’s latest dark novel, a coming-of-age tragedy packed with prose so vivid it leaps off the page.
Lucy Wood, Sublime Horror
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The Woman Under The Ground
Powerful and beautifully observed, ‘The Woman Under the Ground’ is novelist Megan Taylor’s first collection of short stories. The writing is brooding and mysterious with finely drawn characters, so often the victims of absence and loss: a child taken to a neglected museum by her forsaken father; a woman revisiting the scene of an ended affair; a couple taking a road trip to try to reconcile the death of their daughter…
From dark adult secrets to night visitors to the dangerous passions of small girls, these stories explore fractured relationships with an uncanny honesty and insight.
The Woman Under the Ground is both captivating and disturbing… a must-read for readers who like to be challenged and provoked.
Lucy Shiels, Edinburgh Book Review
Megan Taylor’s first short story collection is a beautiful but dark affair… Read it slowly. Treasure its characters – the wonderful, dangerous, honest creatures that they are.
Emily Cooper, Leftlion
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The Lives of Ghosts
A woman returns to the scene of a childhood trauma to confront the ghosts that have haunted her for twenty-five years. In a story told in alternate chapters by the adult and the twelve-year-old Liberty Fuller, we follow her on her journey back to the eerie Scottish loch house where the culmination of a series of terrible events took place.
‘It’s a classic Taylor addition… I loved it… a book to treasure and ponder over – not one however for a bright sunny day but one for a dark and gloomy evening, and all the richer for it.’ – Anne Brooke, Vulpes Libres
The Lives of Ghosts grips from the first line to the last.
Pippa Hennessy, Leftlion
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The Dawning
It is New Year’s Eve, a time for fresh beginnings – but for each member of the fragmenting Haywood family, this night could mark the end. With mother Stella battling depression and father Philip determined to escape, eleven-year-old Zachary and his teenage sister Nicola have nowhere to turn when confronted by their own worst fears. Set on the cold edges of a Derbyshire Peak District town, ‘The Dawning’ explores the danger that can arise even at the heart of a family, over the course of one dark night.
Compelling, enthralling, ensnaring. Megan Taylor spins each character into life and then she makes us wait, breath held, as they unravel… This writing is fearless, is full of heart, is very very good.
Caroline Smailes
The Dawning is one of those hungry reads: appetite whetted very early on, a tasty bit of fiction that you can’t devour fast enough… a dizzy, poetic, brutal, page-turning novel.
Annie Clarkson, Bookmunch
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How We Were Lost
From the moment that fourteen-year-old Janie hears about the disappearance of two tourists from her 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 missing girls herself – unaware that her curiosity will lead her into a disturbing adult world where nothing is quite what it seems.
How We Were Lost was placed second in the novel category of the international Yeovil Prize 2006 (Betty Bolingbroke-Kent Award).
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
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)