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