The Uninvited: Book summary and reviews of The Uninvited by Liz Jensen

The Uninvited Summary

A seven-year-old girl puts a nail gun to her grandmother's neck and fires. An isolated incident, say the experts. The experts are wrong. Across the world, children are killing their families. Is violence contagious? As chilling murders by children grip the country, anthropologist Hesketh Lock has his own mystery to solve: a bizarre scandal in the Taiwan timber industry.

Hesketh has never been good at relationships: Asperger's Syndrome has seen to that. But he does have a talent for spotting behavioral patterns and an outsider's fascination with group dynamics. Nothing obvious connects Hesketh's Asian case with the atrocities back home. Or with the increasingly odd behavior of his beloved stepson, Freddy. But when Hesketh's Taiwan contact dies shockingly and more acts of sabotage and child violence sweep the globe, he is forced to acknowledge possibilities that defy the rational principles on which he has staked his life, his career, and, most devastatingly of all, his role as a father.

Part psychological thriller, part dystopian nightmare, The Uninvited is a powerful and viscerally unsettling portrait of apocalypse in embryo.

The Uninvited Reviews

"Starred Review. An epidemic outbreak of corporate sabotage and murderous children fuels this cerebral thriller from English writer Jensen...her denouement is eerie and foreboding, leaving unanswered as many questions as it addresses." - Publishers Weekly

"Jensen creates a wholly original character in Hesketh Lock while building a spooky, foreboding landscape where children can't be trusted, free will is under siege, and the line separating past, present, and future are not as finite as one might think. Part sf, part thriller, and totally eerie, this is recommended for readers who enjoy dystopian tales, thrillers, and sf." - Library Journal

"In the course of eight inventive, provocative novels, Jensen has carved out a fictional space dense with elements of fantasy and thriller, satire and SF, science and cod-science, but entirely her own. The mainstream is moving towards her, rather than the other way around." - Guardian (UK)

"The Uninvited is a masterclass in creepiness – as unsettling as Margaret Atwood or Kazuo Ishiguro but with modern detail such as Skype calls, industrial espionage and Twitter. It is this hybrid of haunted souls and capitalist cautionary tale that gives the novel its power." - Independent (UK)

"Expertly paced and pitched, combining moments of chilling horror with deadpan comedy, this audacious novel is utterly gripping." - Daily Mail (UK)

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Liz Jensen Author Biography

Liz Jensen was born in Oxfordshire, the daughter of a Danish father and an Anglo-Moroccan mother. She spent two years as a journalist in the Far East before joining the BBC, first as a journalist, then as a TV and radio producer. She then moved to France where she worked as a sculptor and began her first novel, Egg Dancing, which was published in 1995 (1996 in the USA). Back in London she wrote Ark Baby (1998) which was shortlisted for the Guardian Fiction Award, The Paper Eater (2000), and War Crimes for the Home (2002) which was longlisted for the Orange Prize and is currently being adapted for the stage. The Ninth Life of Louis Drax, was published in the UK in June 2004 (Bloomsbury) and was featured on Radio 4's Book at Bedtime. It was...

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