Sam Taylor

Welcome to East of Islington. Stepping over the debris of the previous occupant, Sam Taylor has just moved into her first flat. Ignoring the dodgy postcode (this is so not Notting Hill), the real estate agent had trilled that this was an area with 'potential'. But as in 'East of Eden', many things go on that have little to do with paradise or passion. Except that the brooding undercurrents are delivered in a slightly more English fashion in this hilarious fictional diary of fifteen years of unadulterated gossip, and what happens when children leave their parents for the city. Meet Piano Pete, aka Pete the Plonker, who is keen for a girl friend but too mean to pay for the subscription of his dating website. Or

A chilling post-apocalyptic tale of how far a father will go to protect his children?from the author of The Amnesiac In a world nearly destroyed by catastrophic floods, one family has been spared. Many years ago, as the waters rose, a father and his three children took to their ark and drifted to the safety of a small island. Life there is a quiet idyll of music and farming?and young Alice, Finn, and Daisy are grateful for their salvation?until the day a stranger swims ashore. A terrifyingly plausible adventure story, The Island at the End of the World is a mesmerizing novel from an exciting new writer.

A gripping literary thriller from an exciting new voice in fiction Hailed as 'one to watch' by the UK's Telegraph, Sam Taylor is one of the most imaginative and innovative young writers at work today. With The Amnesiac, his United States debut, he incorporates a murder mystery and a forgotten manuscript into an exhilarating and intelligent novel. When twenty-nine-year-old James Purdew returns to England from his home in Amsterdam, it is to discover what happened during three earlier years of his life that he cannot recall. What he finds, in an old house with a tragic history, is a nineteenth-century manuscript that begins to seem less and less like a work of fiction-and more like the key to his own lost past. Memory and amnesia, fiction and reality, destiny and randomness, heaven and hell-all converge to form an engrossing gothic story that is sure to appeal to fans of Carlos Ruiz Zafon's The Shadow of the Wind.

James Purdew is quietly obsessed with his own past - in particular three years of his life, about which he remembers nothing. So he travels back to the city of H, where he lived during those years, and finds a familiar house, now derelict. Stripping the wallpaper from one of the rooms, James discovers the first chapter of Confessions of a Killer, a nineteenth-century thriller, which seems to offer clues to a tragedy that took place in the house many years before, and one to which James feel inexorably linked. A journey into a mysterious world of fiction and reality, The Amnesiac is a compelling novel by one of Britain's most innovative young storytellers.

One of the most vivid, gripping and chilling first novels of recent years, The Republic of Trees tells the story of Michael, Louis, Alex and Isobel, four children on the edge of adolescence, who run away to the forest to establish their own utopian community. All seems well in the Republic of Trees - until the sudden arrival of Joy. Under her influence, their relationships grow more erotic and obsessive, and the shadows of a nightmarish dystopia start to encroach on reality . . .

Body of the World, Sam Taylor's first book, is the work of a poet whose sense of what it means to be human is inseparable from the physical world, about which he writes with unnerving intimacy. The voice, while grounded in the familiar landscape of twenty-first-century America, is also transparent. It regards itself as integral to that place in time, so that to speak of the human mind and body is to speak of the world, just as perception of the world becomes perception of the physical and mental self: not himself, but the human self. Thus, his subject is the enduring mystery of consciousness in all its embodiments: memory, the rain, a credit card, death, an air conditioner, the scent of eucalyptus. His language is like granite, a substance unto itself yet at home in the flux. As we enter what the poet has called elsewhere "a global age of distance-less information and virtual experience," Body of the World is a necessary book.Oh the body in its bedouin sleep. Always awake, always walking blocks of city scaffolding, always wrapped in rain, hot cocoa, cinnamon. Always a curled embryo, always a curved umbrella, always the handle of an unknown suitcase, always the echo that will not fit inside a cathedral. Always a brief April.A graduate of Swarthmore College and a former Michener Fellow in the MFA program at The University of Texas at Austin, Sam Taylor is a poet, nonfiction writer, and yoga teacher. His poems have appeared in numerous publications and received The Florida Review Editor's Award in Poetry in 2002. He splits his time between teaching English at The University of New Mexico-Taos and as a caretaker for a wilderness refuge in the San Juan Mountains during its snowed-in winter months.