Sara Taylor’s polished novel has almost everything but prophecy and fire

Fiction; The Lauras, By Sara Taylor, William Heinemann, €17.25

Sara Taylor’s second novel is all about running away. It begins with the prototypical scene of family collapse: the uneasily androgynous teenage narrator and protagonist, Alex, is hustled from her bed in the middle of the night. Her parents have been arguing, “their voices pitched low and rasping in that way that meant they thought they were being too quiet to wake me up”.