The Outcast
The village was asleep, with all the people behind the walls and through the windows and up the stairs of the little houses blind and deaf in their beds while anything might happen. Lewis headed down the middle of the road and he kept falling and had to remember to get back on his feet.
He reached the churchyard and stood in the dark with the church even darker above him.
–from The Outcast by Sadie Jones
It’s 1957. Nineteen-year-old Lewis Aldridge is returning by train to his home in Waterford where he has just served a two-year prison term for a crime that shocked the sleepy Surrey community. Wearing a new suit, he carries money his father Gilbert sent — to…
$19.95
March 10, 2009
Sadie Jones was born in London, England, the daughter of a Jamaican-born writer and a London-born actress. After leaving school Jones travelled and taught English as a foreign language in Paris, before returning to London where she worked as a runner for a production company, a temporary secretary and as a waitress, whilst pursuing a professional career as a screenwriter. She practiced this vocation for 15 years before achieving success with her first novel, The Outcast, published in 2008.
Winner of the Costa First Novel Award, The Outcast was shortlisted for the Orange Prize for Fiction. Set in the 1950s, it tells the story of a young boy ostracized from his father and struggling to conform in claustrophobic, post-war, middle-class Britain.…