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ChatChat - Claudia Cragg


May 3, 2012

From Monday 16 July 2012, author Sadie Jones' newest work, 'The Uninvited Guests' is serialized in 5 parts on BBC Radio 4 Extra's Book at Beachtime at 2:30 pm BST (1:30 pm GMT).  

Sadie Jones, who lives in London, is the author of the novels The Outcast, winner of the Costa First Novel Award in the United Kingdom and a finalist for the Orange Prize for Fiction and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction. She also wrote Small Wars, a tale of love, war, and honour, which was published to critical praise on both sides of the Atlantic. 

Jones was born in London, the daughter of the Jamaican-born writer, Evan Jones, and Joanna Jones, a London-born actress. After leaving school, she travelled and taught English as a Foreign Language in Paris, before returning to London where she worked as a runner for a production company, as a temporary secretary and as a waitress, all the while for the next 15 years pursuing a professional career as a screenwriter.

Here in conversation with KGNU's Claudia Cragg, Jones discusses her latest novel, her third, The Uninvited Guests. A grand old manor house deep in the English countryside opens its doors to reveal the story of an unexpectedly dramatic day in the life of one eccentric, rather dysfunctional, and entirely unforgettable family. Set in the early years of the twentieth century, award-winning author Sadie Jones’s The Uninvited Guests is, according to Jacqueline Winspear, the New York Times bestselling author “a sinister tragi-comedy of errors, in which the dark underbelly of human nature is revealed in true Shakespearean fashion.”

From Harper Colllins, the publishers: “One late spring evening in 1912, in the kitchens at Sterne, preparations begin for an elegant supper party in honour of Emerald Torrington’s 20th birthday. But only a few miles away, a dreadful accident propels a crowd of mysterious and not altogether savoury survivors to seek shelter at the ramshackle manor and the household is thrown into confusion and mischief.”

“In The Uninvited Guests, this prize-winning author triumphs in a 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.”