A stunning, gripping psycho-thriller for fans of SJ Watson and Justin Cronin's The Passage.
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 behavioural patterns, and an outsider's fascination with group dynamics.
Nothing obvious connects Hesketh's Southeast Asian case with the atrocities back home. Or with the increasingly odd behaviour of his beloved step-son, 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.
About the Author
Liz Jensen is the bestselling author of seven acclaimed novels, including the Guardian-shortlisted Ark Baby, War Crimes for the Home, The Ninth Life of Louis Drax and, most recently, The Rapture, shortlisted for the Brit Award and selected as a Channel 4 TV Book Club Best Read. She has been nominated three times for the Orange Prize for Fiction and her work has been published in more than twenty countries. Liz Jensen lives in Wimbledon, London.
Industry Reviews
So compelling and, unlike some tales of approaching apocalypse, positively races with ideas ... Expertly paced, combining moments of chilling horror with deadpan comedy, this audacious novel is utterly gripping * Daily Mail * Part science-fiction, part thriller, part cautionary tale ... 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 * Original, nightmarish ... The Uninvited transports the reader to an apocalyptic world on the brink of destruction - recalling Margaret Atwood's haunting The Handmaid's Tale ... A compelling, poetic and subtle psychological thriller * The Lady * Psychologically rich and consistently thought-provoking ... The Uninvited is always absorbing, sometimes funny, often poignant * Sunday Times * Hesketh's matter-of-factness makes for a brilliantly effective narrative voice in the face of unbelievable events: deadpan, even comic ... 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 * Must read ... We Need to Talk About Kevin meets The Children of Men in this literary thriller from the author of The Rapture. As the unsettling story unfolds, delayed flights will be no problem with this in your bag * Elle, Summer Reads: Books for the Beach * I've never read anything like this. Chilling, and thought-provoking, this book offers a vision of a future where things go badly wrong. This is a psychological thriller written by an author with precision timing and an innate talent for the genre ... Compelling to read, difficult to put down, Liz Jensen's new novel is both terrifying and redemptive * Monique Roffey, author of The White Woman on the Green Bicycle * An unsettling portrayal of relationships and society in meltdown, Jensen gives us a story that is both gripping and slightly disturbing ... The Uninvited reads as a cross between thriller, science fiction novel and social commentary. Quite an achievement! **** * Lifestyle *
