Sam Taylor

As electrifying as it is heartbreaking, Sam Taylor's explosive fantasy debut We Are the Fire is perfect for fans of An Ember in the Ashes and the legend of Spartacus. In the cold, treacherous land of Vesimaa, children are stolen from their families by a cruel emperor, forced to undergo a horrific transformative procedure, and serve in the army as magical fire-wielding soldiers. Pran and Oksana—both taken from their homeland at a young age—only have each other to hold onto in this heartless place. Pran dreams of one day rebelling against their oppressors and destroying the empire; Oksana only dreams of returning home and creating a peaceful life for them both. When they discover the emperor has a new, more terrible mission than ever for their kind, Pran and Oksana vow to escape his tyranny once and for all. But their methods and ideals differ drastically, driving a wedge between them. Worse still, they both soon find that the only way to defeat the monsters that subjugated them may be to become monsters themselves.

We Are the Fire

Laurent Binet

Imagines the story of two Czechoslovakian partisans responsible for assassinating the "Butcher of Prague" Reinhard Heydrich, traces their escape from the Nazis and recruitment by the British secret service.

A Novel

HHhH

Leila Slimani

Watch Us Dance

Leïla Slimani

Scent of Flowers at Night

Annie Cohen-Solal

An Artist in France, 1900-1973

Picasso the Foreigner

Republic of Trees

Civilizations

A book of contemporary spirituality that confronts suffering and attempts to reconcile it with a unitary vision of the divine, Body of the World explores the perennial themes of mysticism—of the world as the self—in a variety of new contexts.

Body of the World

David Diop

Door of No Return

Island at the End of the World

David Foenkinos

Charlotte

The amnesiac

Years after an apocalyptic flood during which a father and his three children survived on an ark and drifted to a small island, young Alice, Finn, and Daisy enjoy a quiet life of music and farming until a stranger swims ashore. Original.

The Island at the End of the World

At once poem, essay, memoir fragment, and art object, The Book of Fools is a sweeping elegy for our earth-and our plastic-choked ocean. Faced with the question of how to express the enormous ecological loss of our time, poet Sam Taylor marries this collective loss to a personal story of loss involving childhood, memory, and a mother's early death to cancer, a story which culminates in a scene the speaker is compelled to revisit, relive, and revise. Along the way, the poet's experiments in a poetics of "self-erasure" create a polyphonic reading experience, enrich the book's journey into the underworld, and deepen its investigation into nonfiction, myth, and aesthetics. Weaving together a diversity of themes, styles and lyric innovation, The Book of Fools challenges and refreshes our notions of what a poem can look like and what it can accomplish.

An Essay in Memoir and Verse

The Book of Fools

Antonin Varenne

Retribution Road

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.

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 . . .

The Republic of Trees

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.

Sam Taylor

Books

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