Sadie Jones’s Costa award-winning first novel The Outcast (2008) told the story of a sensitive 10-year-old boy in the 1940s whose mother drowns when the two of them are having a picnic and whose repressed father is utterly unable to help him cope with his grief.
Since then, Jones has covered marital rape in 1950s Cyprus in Small Wars (2009); Edwardian society in The Uninvited Guests (2011); 1970s theatreland in Fallout (2014) and serious dysfunction in a contemporary wealthy family in The Snakes (2019).
In Amy & Lan, Jones’s sixth novel, she returns to the child’s eye view but with a far less obviously tragic narrative than in her debut Amy and Lan are friends growing up with their respective families on a Herefordshire small holding – the novel follows them from the age of seven in 2005 to 12 in 2010.
They are blissfully happy living on Frith Farm, feeding chickens, baling hay and naming calves.
