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The Snakes

A Novel

by Sadie Jones

Narrator Imogen Church

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Length 13 hours 56 minutes

Language English

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Bookseller recommendation

“Breathless. This novel left me absolutely breathless. I found beauty in the multiple layers of sadness and tragedy of the characters and felt a unique sense of closeness to the main character. Jones has delivered an enthralling tale of personal exploration, leading us through scenes full of deep and raw emotion that leave the reader unsure where to place their alliance. Superb!”
— Jennifer Morrow • Bards Alley

Bookseller recommendation

“What role does money play in our lives? Family? Those two questions are at the heart of this amazing story by Sadie Jones. This book deserves to be read (or listened to) and examined and would be a great choice for a book club - there is a great deal here to be dissected and analyzed. Dan and Bea are newly married Londoners who are managing to do fine in the London economy. Dan has grown up in poverty, but Bea grew up in luxury. A key line in the story is when Dan realizes that to Bea "money is a cage," while to him, "money is freedom." That difference the two of them share is an underlying current throughout the story as they arrive at the abandoned hotel in Burgundy where Bea's brother Alex is living after rehab. When tragedy strikes the family Bea gets pulled back in to her family, even after she tried to divorce herself from them. As the story unfolds the reader learns that it's not just the nest of snakes in the hotel attic that are a presence - it's the snakes that are in human form that a person needs to be most careful around.”
— Jennifer • The Bookstore at Fitger's

Summary
About the author

“The Snakes is many things—a parable and an ancient drama where a father’s greed devours his children, a police procedural, an avid take on tabloid venality, and a bitter comedy, superbly observed, where behind a woman’s eyes she is ‘all movement inside herself, like a wasp in a glass.’ I admit that I’m still shaken by parts of this novel. Sadie Jones writes with pitiless aplomb and corrosive intelligence.”—Louise Erdrich

A chilling page-turner and impossible to put down, THE SNAKES is Sadie Jones at her best: breathtakingly powerful, brilliantly incisive, and utterly devastating.

The new novel by Sadie Jones tells the tense and violent story of the Adamsons, a dysfunctional English family, with exceptional wealth, whose darkest secrets come back to bite them. Set mostly in rural France during contemporary times, THE SNAKES is an all-consuming read and a devastating portrait of how money corrupts, and how chance can deal a deadly hand.

THE SNAKES exposes the damage wreaked by parents on children as observed by a new member of the family, Dan, a mixed-race man from Peckham who marries Bea, the daughter who refuses to take any of her father’s filthy money. But when Bea’s brother Alex (who runs a shabby hotel in Paligny, France) dies suddenly in unexplained circumstances, the confusion and suspicion which arise bring other dark family secrets—and violence—to the surface. And none of the family, even the good members, go untouched.

Fiction Mystery & Thriller Fiction - Literary

Sadie Jones is the author of five novels, including The Outcast, winner of the Costa First Novel Award in Great Britain and a finalist for the Orange Prize for Fiction and the Los Angeles TimesBook Prize/Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction; the enchanting, hard-hitting novel set on the island of Cyprus during the British occupation, Small Wars; her most successful, bestselling novel The Uninvited Guests, beloved of Ann Patchett and Jackie Winspear, among other; the romantic novel set in London's glamorous theatre world, Fallout; and most recently, the highly acclaimed, bestselling novel, The Snakes. Sadie Jones lives in London.