Winner of the Costa First Novel Award 2008.

Shortlisted for the Orange Broadband Prize for Fiction 2008.

Costa Book Awards 2008 Judges' comment: "The repressive society of ordinary people is elegantly portrayed in an assured novel of great note."

An incredibly moving story about a damaged son returning home from prison determined to make a better life for himself. However, some things may be too badly broken to fix. An enticing, emotional and thought provoking novel that will keep you engrossed until the final page.

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Featured on The Book Show on Sky Arts on 8 January 2009.

Synopsis

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.

Reviews

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

'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

About the Author

Sadie Jones lives in London. The Outcast is her first novel. More books by this author Author 'Like for Like' recommendation