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Sara Taylor

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The Shore: A Novel Kindle Edition

by Sara Taylor (Author) Format: Kindle Edition

3.3 371 ratings

Editors' pick Best Literature & Fiction

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An ambitious, Baileys prize-nominated debut set in an unforgettable place, introducing a powerful new voice in fiction

The Shore: a group of small islands in the Chesapeake Bay, just off the coast of Virginia. The Shore is clumps of evergreens, wild ponies, oyster-shell roads, tumble-down houses, unwanted pregnancies, murder, and dark magic in the marshes. Sanctuary to some but nightmare to others, it's a place that generations of families both wealthy and destitute have inhabited, fled, and returned to for hundreds of years. From a half-Shawnee Indian's bold choice to escape an abusive home only to find herself with a man who will one day try to kill her, to a brave young girl's determination to protect her younger sister as methamphetamine ravages their family, the characters in this remarkable novel have deep connections to the land, and a resilience that only the place they call home could create.

Through a series of interconnecting narratives that recalls the work of David Mitchell and Jennifer Egan, Sara Taylor brings to life the small miracles and miseries of a community of outsiders, and the bonds of blood and fate that connect them all.

Spanning over a century, dreamlike and yet impossibly real, profound and playful, The Shore is a breathtakingly ambitious and accomplished work of fiction by a young writer of remarkable promise.

Editorial Reviews

Review

Nominated for the 2015 Baileys Women's Prize for Fiction

“A vivid exploration of the struggle for autonomy and the many meanings of what we call home.” —Eimear McBride, author of A Girl Is a Half-formed Thing

“I loved this book. Redemption and revenge thread through these tales of lives at the margins. Epic in breadth but glittering in its detail, The Shore is utterly absorbing.”—Catherine O’Flynn, author of What Was Lost

“[Taylor] can do dark realism as well as she can the magic kind – in fact, she seems able to do most things. This debut is a testament to an exuberant talent and an original, fearless sensibility. It’s also enormous fun to read.”—The Guardian (UK)

“[A] remarkable first novel…Taylor is a terrific storyteller with a flawless narrative voice and, as a portrait of the impoverished rural South, this novel is a real achievement. .. The Shore is a mesmerizing, powerful read."—The Times (UK)

“Reminiscent of David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas and just as ambitious.” —Stylist

“A collection of interweaving stories set on the coast of Virginia…[The Shore] promises lyrical writing and quietly tragic storytelling.”—Huffington Post (UK)

About the Author

SARA TAYLOR is a product of rural Virginia and home education. Between secondary school and college, she painted houses, demonstrated open hearth cooking for museums, and opened a café. At just 24, she has already completed her MA and is currently working on a PhD. The Shore is her first novel.

Product details

ASIN ‏ : ‎ B00N6PD2IS
Publisher ‏ : ‎ Hogarth (May 26, 2015)
Publication date ‏ : ‎ May 26, 2015
Language ‏ : ‎ English
File size ‏ : ‎ 3328 KB
Text-to-Speech ‏ : ‎ Enabled
Screen Reader ‏ : ‎ Supported
Enhanced typesetting ‏ : ‎ Enabled
X-Ray ‏ : ‎ Not Enabled
Word Wise ‏ : ‎ Enabled
Sticky notes ‏ : ‎ On Kindle Scribe
Print length ‏ : ‎ 303 pages
Page numbers source ISBN ‏ : ‎ 0553417738

Best Sellers Rank: #1,618,099 in Kindle Store (See Top 100 in Kindle Store)
- #7,368 in Women's Literary Fiction
- #9,351 in Magical Realism
- #13,193 in Contemporary Literary Fiction

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3.3 371 ratings

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Sara Taylor

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Sara Taylor is a socially anxious product of rural Virginia and the home-schooling 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 a ridiculous 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.

She expects the real adults will tell her to go back to finger painting any minute now.

For links to more fiction and not-exactly-fiction, much of it free, check http://about.me/sara.taylor

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371 global ratings

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KasaC

Biography of a Place

Reviewed in the United States on April 21, 2015

Vine Customer Review of Free Product( What's this? )Verified Purchase

Classified as a novel, this is really a series of linked stories in which the protagonist, usually a woman, is related somehow to every other story in the book. This amazing debut focuses on the pull of its setting, the "outer banks" of Virginia, where each character is affected by the pull of the tide, the nearness of the sea. With the relative calm of the Bay on one side, on the other, the sea, and the turbulence of the emotions engendered by human connection and emotion and circumstance. Each chapter propels the story of a place more than of the two families at the center. There is some raw writing here, but it is satisfying, challenging, and ultimately, rewarding.

4 people found this helpful

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Sandra Iler Kirkland

An Epic Novel Of The Chesapeake Shore

Reviewed in the United States on May 13, 2023

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Sara Taylor uses her own childhood geography to set this epic family narrative. It is set on one of the small islands on the Chesapeake Bay off the coast of Virginia. Most people, if they know of these islands, have heard of Chincoteague, home of wild ponies. But there are other, smaller islands.

The narrator of the novel is a women from one of the original families in the area. Her ancestors go back to a half Native American woman who fled her racist home only to marry a man who was just as racist and tried to kill her to marry a more acceptable women he met later. The women in her family were rugged and strong and none is stronger than she. As a small girl, she saw her father kill her mother and bury her in the backyard. Holly's goal in life is to protect her younger sister so she tells no one what she knows. Instead she protects her sister from their father and the meth-addicted friends he brings around. Then something happens that cannot be overlooked and the family is burst asunder.

Now Holly has returned to the island. She wants to find anyone who knew her parents and to get the true story of her family and all that happened to bring about the childhood she is still trying to reconcile with her adult life. She finds more than she wanted but she needed to know it all.

This is Sara Taylor's debut novel. Her assured recreation of the environment brought her a nomination on the Bailey's Prize for Women's Fiction. Her characters are strong and willing to do whatever is needed to survive while making sure the family will go on. The narrative spans more than a century and close attention is needed to keep all the family lines straight and determine how each character is related to each other. The timeline also goes back and forth a bit and again requires close attention from the reader. But the beauty and uniqueness of this novel richly rewards any effort needed. This book is recommended for literary fiction readers.

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Deborah Chappell

Sara Taylor has talent!

Reviewed in the United States on January 15, 2016

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Sara Taylor has great talent and sadly to say has pegged some scenarios of southern rural life down through the years. Her combination of stories had me referring to the genealogy chart at the front of the book but that didn't help much trying to piece together kin.Maybe there wasn't a need for that chart. I must say that I read The Shore every spare moment; it was that good....but futuristic ending could have been managed differently. The author's purpose was lost on me. I guess I wasn't getting it at all. I believe Sarah Taylor has got genius talent. I'm ready for another book with an ending I can relate to. Go ahead, Ms Taylor, makes us proud!

2 people found this helpful

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SteinbeckLiz

Characters and plot lines never fully come together

Reviewed in the United States on December 20, 2016

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The book covers many generations of characters. A family tree is provided and I referred back to it often, hoping it would aid in bringing the various storylines together. This wasn't the case.

Reviewed in the United States on July 18, 2017

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the writing was alright but the story was oppressively sad with nothing in anyway hopeful to balance it out

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Bonnie L Atkinson

A Well written and great story

Reviewed in the United States on October 8, 2021

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I had to keep referring back to the genealogy table so pleased to have it to keep track of the family relationships

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Boogscott

Epic novel tracing generations of families with fascinating stories

Reviewed in the United States on February 23, 2016

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I'm surprised to see a number of negative reviews of this book. I really enjoyed reading this novel, could hardly put it down. I was fascinated by the history and the characters. I feel like folks who read the book and found it tragic and miserable did not read it all the way through, as, without giving anything away, it was surprisingly beautiful and hopeful.

3 people found this helpful

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Scooter-reader

If only, but still splendid

Reviewed in the United States on May 29, 2016

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This book has some wonderful aspects to it and Ms Taylor is a gifted writer/storyteller. Her descriptions of people and place are clear and sensitive and her characters are intriguing and built with a paucity of words. The spoiler for me was when this book took the reader into the future and introduced a post apocalyptic element that was incongruent with the elegance of all of the other chapters that explored characters in the past and present.. If not for that 10% of the book I would probably be rating this book with a (close to) 5 stars as it is that good. Other readers, I am sure, will feel differently and will happily embrace those speculative bits I found unpalatable. I will look for future writing from Sara Taylor.

6 people found this helpful

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Lady Fancifull

Dark, violent, disturbing, beautifully written, and with an obsidian glitter

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on November 27, 2015

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The Shore is a highly assured debut novel by a young author, originally from rural Virginia, whose tertiary education was in the UK, which is where she now lives.

The setting of this interweaving, deeply entangled collection of individual stories, spins itself backwards and forwards, picking up a thread here, leaving it dangling, working that thread into another patch of story, ranging between 1876 and 2143, within the geography of a patch of small islands off the Virginia Coast, and loosely within the interlocked lives of a couple of individuals born in the 1850s, and their descendants.

The family histories are dark indeed. Women, across the generations, abused by some of their menfolk, who are themselves hardened by poverty and prey to addiction, whether illicit alcohol, home stilled during Prohibition, or, in modern times, the cooking of crystal meth

One family strand tells the story of Medora, child of a Shawnee Indian woman and a brutal white landowner. Medora learns the lore of plants, and within her descendants there are those who still follow shamanic ways, prophetic ways.

It’s extremely difficult to categorise this powerful book – the future moves into an obvious dystopian world, which is heralded in the declining fortunes of the rural community from that 1850s start, and which is echoed in the history of many rural communities in the developed world in the twentieth century.

The book starts with a murder and a mutilation, and there are more murders to come, not to mention rape, castration, physical and emotional abuse – and yet, there is no sense at all of a gratuitous writer titillating with all this

Taylor writes extremely well – and can capture the voices of different generations, different times, men, women and children.

I really liked the fact that I never knew quite where I was going in her book, the fact that she does not follow a one directional linear route with it. The structure mirrored, if you like, the tangle of braided lives, with the grand pattern coming clear at the end, and earlier lives of people now long dead touching the sections set in the twenty-second century

What is also noteworthy, despite the brutality, the violence, the wastedness of many of the lives, is a fierce connection to the land, and family ties, and friendships, particularly concepts of sisterhood, whether sisters by blood, or sisters purely by gender.

Finally, the book cover is rather wonderful. It does not at all suggest, or hint at the true nature of this book, and I am so pleased that it doesn’t. There could have been some very poor and schlocky design, illustrating some of the violence of the subject matter. It was only on finishing the book that the cover began to reveal its subtle appropriateness (shells, just shells of various kinds)

I will, for sure, be following this writer with interest. After such an assured, and original beginning, I have no idea what subsequent books might bring. Taylor has a voice which is unusual, feels authentic, and, for once, the dustjacket praise seems deserved.

For me, Adam Thorpe, poet and novelist (Ulverton) captures her best

“Sara Taylor has a completely natural unforced feel for language and voice: a remarkable debut”

It is.

One person found this helpful

F B.

Variable

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on September 26, 2016

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This is a mix of short but often inter-related stories, all based in the same place but at different times. Some are spell-binding, others you just want to speed-read to get to "the end". There's a really good story within the book that, expanded, would have made a great novel on its own.

Lucy

Strong contender for my book of the year...

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on January 4, 2016

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Wow, this is what I call a book. I was utterly absorbed in the story and especially adored reading about Medora's life. I also loved reading the chapter set in 2037 - I didn't see any of the plot coming until the second I read it! This book had me constantly on the edge of my seat and keen to find out what would happen next.

Fair warning: there are a few extremely dark events in this book which make for uncomfortable reading - there is one in particular which stuck with me throughout the whole book. However everything that happened seemed to fit perfectly with the feel of the book and nothing felt forced or gratuitous in any way.

roykibs

Aftertaste

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on September 17, 2015

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Sara Taylor has one of those limpid prose styles that make it an uninterrupted pleasure reading. The stories/chapters interlink and flit between the past and the future and I suspect that depending upon what the reader brings to them will likewise flit between hope and a festering bleakness. I didn't want to read the one chapter called "Skirt" and when I have bought this book for female friends I have felt the need to have flagged up a "warning" which made me wonder if I would have done likewise for any male friends. It's that kind of book - it's got a lingering aftertaste.

2 people found this helpful

Bella Casper

Effort required!!!!

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on May 16, 2015

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Some of the stories I adored .... Really didn't enjoy the future stuff and had to work hard to keep who was who and connected to who in my mind. .... I would have liked some of the stories to be developed so much more .... Novels in themselves. Beautifully written though

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