The Outcast

Author: Sadie Jones

Stock information

General Fields

  • : $6.50 AUD
  • : 9780099513421
  • : Vintage Books
  • : Vintage Books
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  • : 198mm X 129mm X 32mm
  • : United Kingdom
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  • : books

Special Fields

  • : Sadie Jones
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  • : Paperback
  • : 10-Aug
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  • :
  • : 448
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Barcode 9780099513421
9780099513421

Description

1957, and Lewis Aldridge is travelling back to his home in the South of England. He is straight out of jail and nineteen years old. His return will trigger the implosion not just of his family, but of a whole community. A decade earlier, his father's homecoming casts a different shape. The war is over and Gilbert has recently been demobbed. He reverts easily to suburban life - cocktails at six thirty, church on Sundays - but his wife and young son resist the stuffy routine. Lewis and his mother escape to the woods for picnics, just as they did in wartime days. Nobody is surprised that Gilbert's wife counters convention, but they are all shocked when, after one of their jaunts, Lewis comes back without her. Not far away, Kit Carmichael keeps watch. She has always understood more than most, not least from what she has been dealt by her own father's hand. Lewis's grief and burgeoning rage are all too plain, and Kit makes a private vow to help. But in her attempts to set them both free, she fails to predict the painful and horrifying secrets that must first be forced into the open. As menacing as it is beautiful, THE OUTCAST is a devastating portrait of small-town hypocrisy from an astonishing new voice.

Awards

Winner of Good Housekeeping Book Awards: Best Debut 2008 and Costa First Novel Award 2008. Shortlisted for Galaxy British Book Awards: Sainsbury's Popular Fiction Award 2009.

Author description

Sadie Jones lives in London. The Outcast is her first novel.