The Uninvited Guests - Softcover

JONES,SADIE

Softcover

ISBN 10: 009956369X ISBN 13: 9780099563693

Publisher: Vintage, 2013

Synopsis

Uninvited Guests

About this title

From the Back Cover:

One late spring evening in 1912, in the kitchens at Sterne, preparations begin for an elegant supper party in honor of Emerald Torrington's twentieth birthday. But only a few miles away, a dreadful accident propels a crowd of mysterious and not altogether savory survivors to seek shelter at the ramshackle manor—and the household is thrown into confusion and mischief.

The cook toils over mock turtle soup and a chocolate cake covered with green sugar roses, which the hungry band of visitors is not invited to taste. But nothing, it seems, will go according to plan. As the passengers wearily search for rest, the house undergoes a strange transformation. One of their number (who is most definitely not a gentleman) makes it his business to join the birthday revels.

Evening turns to stormy night, and a most unpleasant parlor game threatens to blow respectability to smithereens: Smudge Torrington, the wayward youngest daughter of the house, decides that this is the perfect moment for her Great Undertaking.

The Uninvited Guests is the bewitching new novel from the critically acclaimed Sadie Jones. The prizewinning author triumphs in this frightening yet delicious drama of dark surprises—where social codes are uprooted and desire daringly trumps propriety—and all is alight with Edwardian wit and opulence.

About the Author:

Sadie Jones was born in London, England, the daughter of a Jamaican-born writer and a London-born actress. After leaving school Jones travelled and taught English as a foreign language in Paris, before returning to London where she worked as a runner for a production company, a temporary secretary and as a waitress, whilst pursuing a professional career as a screenwriter. She practiced this vocation for 15 years before achieving success with her first novel, The Outcast, published in 2008.
 
Winner of the Costa First Novel Award, The Outcast was shortlisted for the Orange Prize for Fiction. Set in the 1950s, it tells the story of a young boy ostracized from his father and struggling to conform in claustrophobic, post-war, middle-class Britain. Her second novel, Small Wars, explores the atrocities of war and the breakdown of a marriage between a young and disillusioned British soldier and his wife, against a backdrop of 1950s Cyprus. The Uninvited Guests is Sadie Jones’s third novel. She lives in London.

About this edition

• Publisher: Vintage
• Publication date: 2013
• ISBN 10: 009956369X
• ISBN 13: 9780099563693
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 356