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Sadie Jones is the author of The Outcast, a winner of the Costa First Novel Award in Great Britain and a finalist for the Orange Prize for Fiction and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction; the novel Small Wars; and the bestselling novel The Uninvited Guests. She lives in London.
Fallout
by Sadie Jones
eBook
$8.24
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ISBN-13:
9780062292834
- Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
- Publication date: 04/29/2014
- Sold by: HARPERCOLLINS
- Format: eBook
- Pages: 432
- File size: 639 KB
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Four young people in 1970s London race toward the future, fueled by love, betrayal, and creative ambition.
Luke Kanowski is a young playwright— intense, magnetic, and eager for life. He escapes a disastrous upbringing in the northeast and, arriving in London, meets Paul Driscoll, an aspiring producer, and the beautiful, fiery Leigh Radley, the woman Paul loves.
The three set up a radical theater company, living and working together; a romantic connection forged in candlelit rehearsal rooms during power cuts and smoky late-night parties in Chelsea's run-down flats. The gritty rebellion of pub theater is fighting for its place against a West End dominated by racy revue shows and the giants of twentieth-century drama.
Nina Jacobs is a fragile actress, bullied by her mother and in thrall to a controlling producer. When Luke meets Nina, he recognizes a soul in danger—but how much must he risk to save her?
Everything he has fought for—loyalty, friendship, art—is drawn into the heat of their collision. As Luke ricochets between honesty and deceit, the promise of the future and his own painful past, the fallout threatens to be immense.
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Library Journal
02/01/2014Hats off to Jones (The Uninvited Guests; The Outcast) for starting a novel with a 13-year-old boy picking the lock at the psychiatric hospital to spring his mother. That startling opening draws readers into the romantic story of a young writer in 1970s London. Luke breaks away from his small town in northern England and embarks on a journey to becoming a playwright. His story twists and turns through the London theater scene and drug culture as Luke struggles with literary ambition, success, and the throes of falling in and out of love. In his naïveté, the quirky playwright uses women like tissues and goes home to write plays until the wee hours. With a producer and a woman stage manager, Luke forms a theater company and the first of several triangles in his quest for love, art, and friendship. When Luke becomes enmeshed with a married actress, he comes of age by facing the consequences. VERDICT Jones's intricate, complex plot, sympathetically drawn characters, and authentic depictions of damaged genius make an unassailable claim for the power of a writer's detailed observation in the face of formula fiction. [See Prepub Alert, 11/3/13.]—J.L. Morin, Boston Univ.
The Wall Street Journal
The strength of Fallout is the insistent thread of hope that runs through all the humiliation and bad behavior. The result is…a fuller, more emotionally satisfying story.Glamour
Emotionally charged.Lucy Atkins
An intoxicating and immersive read... It is a fraught and compelling novel; one that replays itself uncomfortably in the mind long after it is finished.Deirdre O'Brien
Beautifully written... An intense and absorbing story.Anne Ashworth
An intelligent, pacy tale of pretty, talented people, striving for recognition but held back by their past…. Every summer needs a One Day-style read; this book is a contender for that crown.Elizabeth Day
On a par with the Barneses and McEwans of this parish… Jones’s gift - like all great writers - is to leave us wanting so desperately to believe that the story will continue without us once the scenery has been cleared away.Catherine Taylor
Jones highlights beautifully the energetic, naive, cheap red-wine fug of the Seventies start-up, and its decadent antithesis, the emptiness of fatally compromised success.Holly Williams
Fallout is both deliciously gobble-able and carefully constructed.Mernie Gilmore
This absorbing and romantic novel about love, art and the importance of being true to yourself will draw you in and keep you there until the very last page.Red
[Fallout] cements her reputation as a writer in the style of William Boyd; able to take on a variety of styles and mould them to her own voice.Di Speirs in Psychologies
Sadie Jones has an unerring ability to delve into the depths of characters and reveal both their strengths and their weaknesses.Hello!
An enthralling tale of lust, ambition and friendship.New Yorker
The novel is at its best when the characters quietly seek an audience for their pleasures, their pains, and the ‘more permanent wounds of their longer lives waiting, undiscovered.’The New York Times
Jones is unflinching as she plots the course of fallout with no shelter, of wounded lives undone by desperation in love and art.Not Another Book Review (Blog)
[A] wonderful read. Surprising depth of character, accidents of fate that feel like life, and emotional FALLOUT that heralds new maturity, make this a very satisfying novel.Booklist (starred review)
An intoxicating, deeply romantic novel of theater, love, and friendship…With both microscopic precision and operatic emotions, Sadie Jones perfectly captures the exhilaration of the young and the talented as they find their footing in both art and love.Kirkus Reviews
2014-04-03Charismatic young playwright Luke Kanowski, escaping a dark family history to forge his own destiny in London's Theatreland, heads the cast in a welcome if less sure-footed return to period heartache by talented British writer Jones (The Uninvited Guests, 2012, etc.). Notably deft in her reconstructions of not-so-distant eras, Jones here tags Biba fashion, the Osmonds, T. Rex and a myriad other evocative details of the late 1960s and early '70s as background to the four stage-struck hopefuls at the center of her fourth novel, each of them significantly molded by their parents' influences. Luke has broken away from a grim home life—his father's a boozy immigrant, his mother's a long-term patient in the local mental asylum—after a chance meeting with two strangers, aspiring stage producer Paul Driscoll and student Leigh Radley. Paul and Luke are destined to become firm friends, while Leigh, caught between them, will become Paul's girlfriend after a humiliatingly hurtful early encounter with Luke. Actress Nina Jacobs has survived the lifelong pressure of a competitive mother by walling herself in passivity. While Luke begins to find success as a writer, Nina is pushed by her mother into a relationship with Tony Moore, a manipulative stage producer of ambiguous sexual orientation. Tony not only marries Nina, but casts her in a play about a torture victim, which makes her a star—and bewitches Luke into wanting to save her. Jones' gift for emotional intensity has not deserted her, but her material here is less beguiling than in her two first (and strongest) novels, The Outcast (2008) and Small Wars (2010). Nina is an unsympathetic character, and the psychology underpinning events develops in increasingly schematic fashion. Crises, broken promises and bruised hearts ensue, and although the story comes to rest in the right place, it never quite escapes its sense of staginess. Skillful, intelligent, always readable but this time less-persuasive work from an appealing author.