Search History (Amy Taylor, A&U)

Most of us have left some kind of regrettable imprint on the internet. It’s with this discarded online ephemera that anxiety swells about what people may make of it all—including future partners. This angst about past online selves informs Amy Taylor’s quick-witted debut novel Search History. Ana is 28 and new to Melbourne, having fled Perth after a disastrous breakup. She has few friends and a job that inspires little excitement, so her focus becomes finding traction on the dating scene. After one particularly bad encounter via the apps, Ana decides to go offline and instead welcome the freedom that dating off the grid in a new city offers: ‘The vastness of Melbourne allowed me to be anonymous but not alone.’ Soon Ana has a chance encounter with a mystery man at a bar and finds herself completely beguiled by him. An obsessive online quest begins to piece together his romantic backstory. Social media proves a double-edged sword: Ana sources instructive intel on his past girlfriend but becomes fixated on why the relationship fell apart. Taylor writes in crisp and clever strokes, with many a metaphor helping convey Ana’s increasingly frayed courtship: ‘Silence is rejection in slow motion. It’s an injury sustained from a blow that was never dealt.’ With throwbacks to bygone MSN and MySpace habits, Taylor reminds us how fraught desire can be today when we mediate our judgements solely through the web. Search History is a light-hearted and earnest take on the challenges that courting has for those eager to hit search before the reply button.

Books+Publishing reviewer: Nathan Smith is a freelance writer. Books+Publishing is Australia’s number-one source of pre-publication book reviews.

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Category: Reviews