The Outcast

1957 and Lewis Aldridge is traveling back to his home in the South of England. He is straight out of jail and nineteen years old. His return will trigger the implosion not just of his family, but of a whole community.

A decade earlier, his father’s homecoming takes a different shape. The war is over and Gilbert has recently been demobbed. He reverts easily to suburban life – cocktails at six-thirty, church on Sundays – but his wife and young on resist the stuffy routine. Lewis and his mother escape to the woods for picnics, just as they did in the wartime days. Nobody is surprised that Gilbert’s wife counters convention, but they are all shocked when, after one of their jaunts, Lewis comes back without her.

Not far away, Kit Carmichael keeps watch. She has always understood more than most, not least from what she has been dealt by her own father’s hand. Lewis’s grief and private rage are all too plain, and Kit makes a private vow to help. But in her attempts to set them both free, she fails to predict the painful and horrifying secrets that must first be forced into the open.

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Sadie Jones reads from The Outcast

Sadie Jones

lives in London. The Outcast is her first novel.

Sadie Jones's q & a

What sparked The Outcast?
I wanted to write an iconic story about a person who is reviled for real or imagined sins, by a society that is itself corrupt. I wanted to explore the ambivalence that we have about damaged people who both repel and attract us.

Where and when is the novel set?
The novel is set in Surrey, between 1945 and 1957. There didn’t seem any better backdrop for feelings of isolation and an inability to conform.

Do you have a favourite character in the novel?
My favourite character is Lewis, the protagonist; he’s more real to me than quite a lot of actual people.

What's your favourite children's book and why?
A Little Princess, by Frances Hodgson Burnett. I think Victorian morality speaks very strongly to many children, but also Sara Crewe is not just your average 19th century goody-goody, she’s eccentric and has rage and extraordinary toughness.