Critics' Opinion:
Readers' rating:
Published Jan 2013
320 pages
Genre: Thrillers
Publication Information
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.
"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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Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Liz Jensen was born in Oxfordshire, to an Anglo-Moroccan librarian mother and a Danish violin-maker father. She studied English at Somerville College, Oxford and worked first as a journalist in Hongkong and Taiwan. She then worked as a TV and radio producer for the BBC in the UK.
In 1987 she moved to France where she worked as a sculptor and freelance journalist, and she began writing her first novel, Egg Dancing. This was published in 1995, after her return to London, where she wrote Ark Baby (1998), The Paper Eater(2000), War Crimes for the Home (2002), The Ninth Life of Louis Drax (2004), My Dirty Little Book of Stolen Time (2006) and The Rapture (2009). She is currently working on her eighth novel, a ghost story.
Jensen's work has been short-listed for the Guardian Fiction award...
... Full Biography
Author Interview
Link to Liz Jensen's Website
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