The Uninvited Guests - Brossura

Jones, Sadie

Brossura

ISBN 10: 0307402533 ISBN 13: 9780307402530

Casa editrice: Knopf Canada, 2012

Riassunto

All their preparations had been in vain. Emerald’s birthday celebrations had begun in confusion and disarray. She cast about for something sensible to say, something that would reassure her mother and friends that an hospitable timetable would be re-established, and was about to suggest the library, and tea, when she halted, arrested in movement like a musical statue.
 
She was obeying a prompt, an instinct left over, perhaps, from an earlier time; the instinct that stops a mouse in its short-sighted tracks when a cat is watching it from a chair; that makes a dog lying by the fire tremble, and whimper, when there is no one near to see.
 
And as she stopped, there came, of a sudden, a hard gust of wind behind her, striking her through her dress, forcefully, blowing all thoughts of convention from her mind. The heavy front door was closed, but the chill struck Emerald’s back, finding its way through the jamb and hinges – through the solid wood itself, it seemed, as a cold wave will sometimes catch one as one leaves the sea and knock the breath from the body.
 
– from The Uninvited Guests by Sadie Jones
 

It is the last day of April in 1912, and the country estate of Sterne is humming with preparations for an intimate dinner party. Today Emerald Torrington turns 20. The members of the household – and their guests, now en route – have no idea that over the course of this single day and night, all their lives will be turned upside down, for better or for worse.
 
Charlotte Torrington is Emerald’s mother. A great beauty, she was widowed years ago by her businessman-turned-gentleman-farmer husband. She has recently remarried, to the steady and loving Edward Swift. Despite his affable nature, Edward is fiercely resented by Emerald and her brother Clovis, a dissolute 19 year old whose days are largely spent moping and plotting. The youngest family member is Charlotte’s youngest daughter, Imogen, known as Smudge. A frail, faerie-like wild child, she flits through house and field – and even upon high rooftops – generally unsupervised.
 
Despite their apparent comfort, the family lives well beyond its means. Edward has been dispatched to Manchester to borrow money from a lender of dubious morals. The family employs a handful of servants to keep the household in minimal working order: there are the maids Pearl and Myrtle, the groom Robert, and Stanley the stable boy. Heading up the servants is the housekeeper, Florence Trieves, a widowed acquaintance from Charlotte’s youth. Like Charlotte, Florence was once a great beauty, but today is a grim crow-like figure garbed in black. She is furiously making preparations for tonight’s menu, to include such delicacies as calf’s head soup and stewed eel.
 
The family has invited only their most intimate friends to join them for the evening’s celebration. They are expecting Emerald’s dearest friend, the sweet Patience Sutton, who will be accompanied by her brother Ernest, an interning physician. Upon their arrival Emerald discovers that Edward has matured rather pleasingly, no longer the gawky teenager with whom she once rambled the grounds of Sterne during long-ago summers. A late invitation has also been extended to their neighbour, the rich and respectable John Buchanan, who has been perplexing the lovely Emerald of late with his hot-and-cold attentions.
 
But with the arrival of their guests comes distressing news: A train has derailed, and its survivors – most of whom were travelling third class – are to be received at Sterne. As the owners of the only estate in the vicinity, it is the Torringtons’ duty to accept this responsibility, no matter the disruption to their dinner plans. With Charlotte more preoccupied with naps and arranging her hair, and Clovis of no help at the best of times, Emerald must put aside her confusing feelings about the two men now vying for her attention, and set about preparing for whatever is to come.
 
But as the motley crowd of survivors is stowed away in the morning room, their cries of hunger and discomfort briefly assuaged by tea, Clovis becomes entranced by their self-appointed leader, the unnerving and mercurial Charlie Traversham-Beechers. Clovis invites this brash fellow to join their dinner party, and Emerald is soon to learn that there can be no adequate preparation for the strangeness of the evening that is to unfold.
 
Contemporary readers will find much to relish in this brilliant pastiche of the greats of Victorian and Edwardian literature. Deftly composed with liberal sprinklings of acerbic wit, finely rendered pathos, and spine-tingling horror, The Uninvited Guests is a once-again triumphant work by a new and celebrated author.

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Recensione:

“The Uninvited Guests is at once a shimmering comedy of manners and disturbing commentary on class.  It is so well-written, so intricately plotted, that every page delivers some new astonishment. It is a brilliant novel.”
—Ann Patchett, author of State of Wonder
 
“What a delicious read! Like something written by a wicked Jane Austen, here is love and error in a ramshackle manor house complete with railway survivors, a birthday party and a pony. I was completely captivated by its madcap nature and then, utterly unprepared for the strange fruit that the story became. Passing like a spring fever, here is a fairy tale that stays with you long after it is gone. I couldn’t put it down.”
—Sarah Blake, author of The Postmistress
 
“What opens as an amusing Edwardian country house tale soon becomes a sinister tragi-comedy of errors, in which the dark underbelly of human nature is revealed in true Shakespearean fashion. Sadie Jones is a most talented and imaginative storyteller, and The Uninvited Guests is a very clever novel.”
—Jacqueline Winspear, author of Elegy for Eddie
 
“I settled in with The Uninvited Guests thinking I knew what kind of Edwardian pleasures were in store: the fraught dinner party in an endangered, rambling house, the feuding family, the rich suitor, the disruptive visitors. The novel has all of those delightful things, but it also defied every one of my expectations. I saw none of it coming. I read it in one breathless sitting, and finished wanting to give it to everyone I know.”
—Maile Meloy, author of Both Ways Is the Only Way I Want It

L'autore:

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. Her second novel, Small Wars, explores the atrocities of war and the breakdown of a marriage between a young and disillusioned British soldier and his wife, against a backdrop of 1950s Cyprus. The Uninvited Guests is Sadie Jones’s third novel. She lives in London.

Su questa edizione

• Editore: Knopf Canada
• Data di pubblicazione: 2012
• ISBN 10: 0307402533
• ISBN 13: 9780307402530
• Rilegatura: Copertina flessibile
• Numero di pagine: 272