The Snakes : A Novel
Author(s): Sadie Jones
The award-winning, bestselling author of The Uninvited Guests and The Outcast returns with a bold, brilliant, and beautiful novel, unflinching in its gaze, which holds the reader in its tense grip from start to unforgettable finish.
Recently married, psychologist Bea and Dan, a mixed-race artist, rent out their tiny flat to escape London for a few precious months. Driving through France they visit Bea’s dropout brother Alex at the hotel he runs in Burgundy. Disturbingly, they find him all alone and the ramshackle hotel deserted, apart from the nest of snakes in the attic.
When Alex and Bea’s parents make a surprise visit, Dan can’t understand why Bea is so appalled, or why she’s never wanted him to know them; Liv and Griff Adamson are charming, and rich. They are the richest people he has ever met. Maybe Bea’s ashamed of him, or maybe she regrets the secrets she’s been keeping.
Tragedy strikes suddenly, brutally, and in its aftermath the family is stripped back to its heart, and then its rotten core, and even Bea with all her strength and goodness can’t escape.
A chilling page-turner and impossible to put down, The Snakes is Sadie Jones at her best: breathtakingly powerful, brilliantly incisive, and utterly devastating.
Review(s):
“Deliciously wicked…The novel’s contemporary setting exhibits the markings of Gothic terror, with wry allusions to Frankenstein, Edgar Allan Poe and even Stephen King. But Jones coils all these old elements around new anxieties involving race and class…She’s pursuing a wholly original story about the repercussions of trauma…The criminal story that emerges grows more shocking because of the rare quality of brutality in Jones’s prose…She excels at drawing us into tender sympathy with her characters even as she coolly subjects them to the most monstrous treatment. The result is hypnotic—like staring into the serpent’s eyes just before it strikes.”
“The Snakes is many things—a parable and an ancient drama where a father’s greed devours his children, a police procedural, an avid take on tabloid venality, and a bitter comedy, superbly observed, where behind a woman’s eyes she is ‘all movement inside herself, like a wasp in a glass.’ I admit that I’m still shaken by parts of this novel. Sadie Jones writes with pitiless aplomb and corrosive intelligence.”
“The Snakes is a creepy, scary novel about the corrosive effects of money and power and parenthood… Jones writes with cool, crisp prose about cruelty of many kinds; about class and race and power; and about regular people caught up in complicated situations that veer far out of control. She has an Ian McEwan-esque ability to provoke tension and anxiety… I would walk a long distance to procure one of Jones’s daring, interesting, beautifully written, atmospheric books.” “Provocative and propulsive”
“Jones’ portrayal of a dysfunctional family is as powerful as her depiction of provincial France in all its ‘tasteful narrowness’ and her merciless examination of greed, class and corruption…The book’s desperate last act may constitute a jolting change of gear and direction, but that matters little because the events that unfold are so electrifying.”
“Corrosive secrets are slowly revealed as the story comes to a heart-pounding conclusion. Don’t be misled by this book’s title. Although a few creepy reptiles make an appearance, the real snakes in this twisty story are human ones. Another memorable novel from the versatile Jones.”
“Jones’s propulsive yet thoughtful fifth novel grips readers from the first page…a tightly crafted, deeply moving, and thrilling story about how money corrupts and all the myriad ways members of a family can ruin each other.”
“All families are dysfunctional in some way, but some, like Bea's family, ratchet dysfunction to dizzying heights… An understated, yet page-turning story.”
“Sadie Jones has composed a fast-paced story, a reflection on the dysfunctional family of origin that questions principles/values and the sins that are committed in the wake of their disregard. Like the sound of the snakes moving across the hotel attic floor, ‘The Snakes’ will haunt you long after you’ve finished this book.”
"I read The Snakes with a reader's delight and a writer's awe: Sadie Jones exerts such a powerful influence of creeping dread I found myself pausing both to recover my breath and to wonder how she had done it. It is somehow both pitiless - not least in its eviscerating portrait of the corrupting power of money, in which it recalls the novels of Edward St Aubyn - and ultimately possessed with a strange grace. Genuinely, a triumph."
“Finished The Snakes by Sadie Jones in the small hours last night. Gripping from the outset, then finally unputdownable. The writing is magnificent. One of the most powerful and uncompromising novels I've read in years.”
ISBN: 9780062911568