Exclusive interview with author Sadie Jones and a review of her new novel about a family who has to deal with uninvited guests when there is a train tragedy
Rating: Three Stars
By Gabrielle Pantera
“I had a dream about a house, a quite detailed dream, and when I woke up I realized that I had dreamed the same house, but in a different story, or at a different time, at least twice before,” says The Uninvited Guests author Sadie Jones. “It felt like a present. I knew immediately that the house was going to be at the centre of a book, I just needed to people it and find a story.”
Jones’ latest work is set over 24 hours at Sterne, the English manor home of Charlotte Torrington Swift, her second husband Edward and her children Emerald, Clovis and Imogene (nicknamed Smudge). The family are preparing for Emerald’s birthday dinner, which Edward will miss the party as he need to go to town to secure a loan which will keep their many creditors at bay and allow them to continue to live at Sterne. Their problems stem from Charlotte’s first husband, who died with many debts.
As the guests begin arrive for dinner news filtes through of a train disaster and Charlotte agrees to help by accommodating survivors from the wreck. But someone from Charlotte’s past is among the uninvited guests, and as the story unfolds we become intrigued both by what exactly is Charlotte hiding and will she get to keep the family home?
Jones’ descriptions were vivid and helped move the story along, but at times I found the characters too one-dimensional. Shorter sentence structure would have helped, as well as more fleshing out of the uninvited guests.
”The language of the book was the greatest surprise,” says Jones. “My first two books were set in the 1950s and although quite different to one another had a similar realistic narrative tone. Even though I had planned The Uninvited Guests, and felt I knew the world well, when I finally began to write it the way the words came, the language of it, which is quite heightened, arch and colorful, was a very happy surprise. It felt quite liberating to let myself off the lead, as it were, in terms of vocabulary and imagery. It was playful.”
”Since writing novels, and being lucky enough to find readers for them, I have traveled to publicize them to quite a few places,” says Jones. “I am uncomfortable with the exposure of publicity but to travel alone, without friends, husband or children – for the first time since my twenties – has been fascinating, and also surprisingly empowering.”
”I did very little – comparatively,” says Jones. “Before starting to write, I read books of the period – the turn of the last century – in order to ‘get my eye in’, and I did a bit of internet research for period detail. The book is a fable, a fairytale and rather surreal, and all set in one house, so it wasn’t necessary to research it in the same way I did Small Wars, for instance.”
”I was a sporadically employed screenwriter for many years before I started to write novels,” says Jones.
Jones’s first novel, The Outcast, was published in 2008. Here second book Small Wars, was published in 2009.
“The Outcast was short-listed for the Orange (now Woman’s) Prize for Fiction, won the Costa First Novel Prize, and was long-listed for the Guardian First Novel Prize,” says Jones. “My second, Small Wars, was long-listed for the Orange.”
Jones is currently working on the screenplay for a two-part adaptation of The Outcast for the BBC and her fourth book, Fallout that will be published May. Jones was born and lives in London.
The Uninvited Guests: A Novel by Sadie Jones. File Size: 489 KB, Print Length: 288 pages, Publisher: Harper; Reprint edition (February 20, 2013). Sold by: HarperCollins Publishers, Language: English ASIN: B006ICVRCO $14.99
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