The Outcast

by Sadie Jones

Love it, love it, love it. A powerful piece of art about repression, the price of remaining silent, love, hate, self-loathing, forgiveness and the ability to move on. The story is both heartbreaking and lovely at the same time. Surrender to the crisp sentences, vivid imagery and limited dialogue and you will be moved t pieces.

Lewis’s attempts to embrace a society that will never embrace him back is gut wrenching. Lewis will break your heart. Lewis, the flawed antihero, who is devastatingly damaged and flawed, will make you love him. Every woman in the book wants to heal him and then sleep with him. Lewis is the man you fall in love with when every part of your brain tells you you shouldn’t but you can’t help yourself. He’s hot, flawed and you can’t help but want him and that is why he is atop my Sultry Six.

Because Alice wants to heal Lewis, any way she can, it had to happen. She needed to heal him, she believed she could, she had to do it. The sexual aura between them after he returns home intensifies and intensifies until they couldn’t deny it anymore- while fundamentally wrong- I wasn’t appalled by it, I believed it because of who Lewis was and the reactions he invokes in people. The scene was raw, and filled with horror, hate, passion, desperation and momentary release. It had to happen.

Lewis’s confrontation with Dicky Carmichael, as a reader and a romantic, was satisfying. It was theatrical and a bit exaggerated but I think the ability of the townspeople to brush aside something so egregious and frightening was the point, so it had to be grand and over-the top.

At the train station as Lewis tells Kit: I’ll be better for you, I promise’ and then as the train pulls away Kit says ‘We’re saved!’ I cried, reread it and cried again. The author has such a command of the story, and the relationship between Kit and Lewis that these were the perfect words to say by the perfect people.


The tension, the anxiety for Lewis, the worry for Lewis and his future, then the worry for Kit, his isolation and her devotion and loyalty to him is what makes this story so real and believable. It’s satisfying for the reader. It’s why I love to read.


This is the first novel by Sadie Jones and it is something not to be missed. It is definitely one to put on my bookshelf.