Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #83 in Books
• Published on: 2008-06-16
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 448 pages

Amazon.co.uk

About the Author ~ Sadie Jones
Sadie Jones was born in London. She grew up in a creative environment: her father is the Jamaican poet and screenwriter Evan Jones, and her mother was an actress. As her friends took up their various university places, Sadie worked in a variety of jobs. After travelling, she settled in London and spent several years as a screenwriter, before writing her first novel, The Outcast. Sadie is married and has two children.

Exclusive Amazon.co.uk Interview with Sadie Jones

What is The Outcast about?

The Outcast is about a boy called Lewis - his childhood and adolescence – as he grows up in the stultifying world of the home counties in the late forties and fifties. It is an everyday tale of drunkenness, violence and a fair amount of sex, set amongst the well-brought-up professional classes. It is also a love story.

What inspired you to write it?

The idea of a boy coming out of prison and trying to fit into a community that is itself corrupt was the first thing that came to me. I wanted to write an Oedipal story, with iconic characters, about what the nature of what it is to belong, and injustice. I set it in the fifties because I have always been very attracted to the books and films of that time.

Who are your literary influences?

It’s difficult to think in terms of being influenced, because when you write you try to find your own voice and forget those of other writers, but I must in some way be a product of books I’ve loved. My favourite writers are Hemingway, Capote, Salinger, McEwan and Dostoyevsky.

If you could recommend just one "must-read book" to anyone, what would it be and why?

It would be The Brothers Karamazov, by Dostoyevsky, because it is a book that tells a riveting story and is profoundly insightful about human nature. Dostoyevsky has an undeserved reputation of being sort of turgid, but nothing could be further from the truth of this book. He relishes the events he discloses and has no prissiness – he gets in the mud with his characters.

What top tips do you have for anyone looking to write their first book?

It’s very hard; I only know what works for me, which is planning, structure and hard work. I have found that whenever I write thinking I’ll sort some lingering doubt out later, I generally run into trouble. If you can’t answer every single question about your story, then people will be able to tell. Also, try not to get too tied up in whether or not it’s any good, or what will happen to it when it’s finished – all of that can be paralysing.

Reviews for The Outcast

An assured voice, a riveting story, and an odd, wrenchingly sympathetic protagonist. I would never have imagined this was a first novel. Lionel Shriver

In the tradition of ATONEMENT and REMAINS OF THE DAY but in her own singularly arresting voice, Sadie Jones conjures up the straight-laced, church-going, secretly abusive middle class of 1950s England. The Outcast is a passionate and deeply suspenseful novel about what happens to those who break the rules, and what happens to those who keep them. I loved reading this wonderful debut. Margot Livesey

I much admired The Outcast. Sadie Jones tells her story using minute details to convey the apparent ordinariness of her characters' lives. But from the choreography of these walking, smiling, drinking people, from their emotional repression and their children's deprivation, she conjures an atmosphere of menace and suspense that erupts into violence and tragedy. It is an impressive debut for this talented new novelist. Michael Holroyd

Sadie Jones is an important new voice. She writes in beautiful prose of terrible events, demonstrating how love denied brings brutal consequences. She conjures the repressive social climate of the 1950s with awful accuracy, and explores the hearts and minds of young people with forensic skill. A great stylist and fine storyteller. Joan Bakewell

One of Radio 4’s Book at Bedtime reads for February, Jones’ story is imbued with brooding atmosphere and drama. Understated and elegantly narrated with attention to period detail, this is a gripping love story with a twist. If you liked Atonement by Ian McEwan, you’ll love this. Harper’s Bazaar (Feb issue)

A wonderfully assured first novel. Guardian

The prose is elegant and spare, but the story it reveals is raw and explosive… Devastatingly good. Daily Mail

The Outcast grips from page one… Jones has captured the stultifying morals and mores of Fifties English middle-class life with satisfying accuracy. Publishing News

Set in post WWII suburban London, this superb debut novel charts the downward spiral and tortured redemption of a young man shattered by loss. The war is over, and Lewis Aldridge is getting used to having his father, Gilbert, back in the house. Things hum along splendidly until Lewis’s mother drowns, casting the 10-year-old into deep isolation…Jones’s prose is fluid, and Lewis’s suffering comes across as achingly real. Publishers Weekly

A confident, suspenseful and affecting first novel, delivered in cool, precise, distinctive prose. Kirkus

Good Housekeeping
Best Debut Novel

Review
'Jones successfully evokes the stifling, repressive atmosphere of an English village during a hot summer after the second World War'

Customer Reviews

Where Was the Love?
I read this novel with greater speed than usual, because I just so wanted something good to happen to Lewis - I was frightened for him! The novel starts by reminding us that in 1945 most young children hardly knew their fathers as they had been brought up by their mothers whilst the men were at war. Suddenly there's a man in the house and the dynamics of daily life changed dramatically for 7-year-old Lewis. Three years later, the centre of his life was gone and in the 1940/50's bereavemnt counsellors didn't exist, so how was this child expected to come to terms with his loss? Love from others, you would think, but his father shuts him out emotionally and five months later introduces him to his new 'mother'. This was middle-class life in the 50's - when keeping up appearances and a stiff upper lip were everything, and the rot was kept hidden. I wouldn't recommend reading this novel if you're at all depressed, because its content is quite terrible - the reader is spared nothing. Great writing though.

Ghastly,melodramatic rubbish
Talk about over egging the pudding.Tradgedy upon tradgedy befalls our hapless hero Lewis...and he thoroughly deserves it!.He's an unsympathetic character who creates his own misery and then keeps wallowing in it.I just wanted to keep yelling 'lighten up you self pitying idiot'!.
Theres no light and shade with the remaining characters in this tedious tale and the 'baddies' are hilariously awful in a 'Snidely Whiplash' kind of a way.By the end,I fully expected someone to end up tied to a railway track with an express train approaching.
The author seems to have mistaken a gripping and suspenseful plotline and engaging characterisation with unremitting and ridiculous histronics.A tawdry,badly written melodrama.

read it
Dear Amazon, last time I wrote this review it appeared under the name of George! Please could you publish it under the name of J.Crow. South Wales, thanks.
Sadie Jones has written an authentic , moving and original novel that evokes the 50's with eery accuracy.
I grew up in the 50's and 'The Outcast,' is a vivid and moving reminder of the secrets and lies of that battle-weary decade.
Also, why this knee jerk reaction that compares any good new young novelist who writes crisp , readable, unadorned prose with Ian Mc Ewan. Both Sadie Jones and Ian Mc Ewan are fine writers, but very different.

J. Crow. South Wales