Sadie Jones — The Outcast

Chatto & Windus 2008 Paperback, 347pp. B1957, and Lewis Aldridge is travelling back to his family home in the South of England. He is straight out of jail and just nineteen years old. His return will trigger the implosion not just of his family, but of a whole community./B 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, IThe Outcast/I is a devastating portrait of small-town hypocrisy from an astonishing new voice. Foxing to the bottom edge of pages. Stamped 'Reading Copy'. (ISBN: 9780701181765). Good.