Longlisted for last year’s Baileys women’s prize for fiction, Sara Taylor’s savage yet hyper-readable debut zigzags randomly between the years 1876 and 2143 to trace several generations of families on three islands in rural Virginia. It’s a novel in stories, with chapters linked by the pervasive misogyny faced by the doughty female protagonists, whether it’s the 19th century, when a half-Native American woman is set on fire by her white husband, or the 2030s, which see Roe v Wade quashed. The pages are thick with descriptions of male physical abuse, but this brutal book is also about women’s survival – and vengeance.
Taylor is dedicated to entertainment despite her theme: a steady detonation of shocking detail reels you in. The opening line mentions a murder - the body of a local sex pest has been found in a creek with his penis cut off - and by the end of the first chapter, set in 1995, we’ve heard about two more. The facts are withheld for maximum impact by the narrator, 13-year-old Chloe, left to fend for herself and her younger sister by an abusive father hooked on crystal meth. A sickening middle segment, related by a male eyewitness, reveals how Chloe was conceived; another section uses an urgent second person to put us in the shoes of a pregnant young runaway who hits the road with cash her deadbeat partner makes her take for an abortion.
“Species go extinct, what’s the big tragedy in one of those species being humans?” someone says in a late chapter, as a sexually transmitted virus sets about wiping out Americans a couple of decades hence. You feel a bleak slash-and-burn thesis about patriarchy at work here: it’s like a late-Victorian new woman novel in which the only way out is suicide, but writ large. Yet the horror isn’t wholly unrelieved. In the final section, Taylor switches the novel’s judiciously lyrical register to let a lonely “halfman” narrate at the dawn of a post-apocalyptic civilisation in the next century. He uses his discovery of how to brew alcohol to persuade an island chief to hand over his daughter; she enters the marriage with her eyes open, but there’s an optimism about their child-bearing union that the previous 300 pages of this harrowing, high‑octane novel make it almost impossible to share.
The Shore is published by Cornerstone (£8.99). Click here to buy it for £6.99
