Critics' Opinion:
Readers' rating:
Published Jun 2019
448 pages
Genre: Thrillers
Publication Information
A chilling page-turner and impossible to put down, The Snakes is Sadie Jones at her best: breathtakingly powerful, brilliantly incisive, and utterly devastating.
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.
"The campy ending doesn't quite live up to the rest of the book—but what precedes is 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." - Publishers Weekly
"A well-executed, character-driven cross between domestic drama and crime thriller." - Kirkus Reviews
"The Snakes asks serious questions about human nature, avarice and justice, wrapped in the fast-paced rhythms of a thriller. It is written with Jones's trademark economy and a fierce attention to the nuances of familial cruelty." - The Guardian (UK)
"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...I admit that I'm still shaken by parts of this novel. Sadie Jones writes with pitiless aplomb and corrosive intelligence." - Louise Erdrich, author of Future Home of the Living God
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Photo by Charles Hopkinson
Sadie Jones is the author of five novels, including The Outcast, winner of the Costa First Novel Award in Great Britain and a finalist for the Orange Prize for Fiction and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize/Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction; the enchanting, hard-hitting novel set on the island of Cyprus during the British occupation, Small Wars; her most successful, bestselling novel The Uninvited Guests, beloved of Ann Patchett and Jackie Winspear, among others; the romantic novel set in London's glamorous theatre world, Fallout; and the highly acclaimed, bestselling novel, The Snakes. Sadie Jones lives in London.
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